Berth management in container terminal the templa

Authors: Rajeeva Moorthy ChungPiaw Teo

Publish Date: 2006/04/12

Volume: 28, Issue: 4, Pages: 495-518

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Abstract

One of the foremost planning problems in container transshipment operation concerns the allocation of home berth preferred berthing location to a set of vessels scheduled to call at the terminal on a weekly basis The home berth location is subsequently used as a key input to yard storage personnel and equipment deployment planning For instance the yard planners use the home berth template to plan for the storage locations of transshipment containers within the terminal These decisions yard storage plan are in turn used as inputs in actual berthing operations when the vessels call at the terminal In this paper we study the economical impact of the home berth template design problem on container terminal operations In particular we show that it involves a delicate tradeoff between the service waiting time for vessels and cost movement of containers between berth and yard dimension of operations in the terminal The problem is further exacerbated by the fact that the actual arrival time of the vessels often deviates from the scheduled arrival time resulting in lastminute scrambling and change of plans in the terminal operations Practitioners on the ground deal with this issue by building capacity buffers in the operational plan and to scramble for additional resources if needs be We propose a framework to address the home berth design problem We model this as a rectangle packing problem on a cylinder and use a sequence pair based simulated annealing algorithm to solve the problem The sequence pair approach allows us to optimize over a large class of packing efficiently and decomposes the home berth problem with data uncertainty into two smaller subproblems that can be readily handled using techniques from stochastic project scheduling To evaluate the quality of a template we use a dynamic berth allocation package developed recently by Dai et al unpublished manuscript 2004 to obtain various berthing statistics associated with the template Extensive computational results show that the proposed model is able to construct efficient and robust template for transshipment hub operations

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