Global planning in a multi-terminal and multi-modal maritime container port

Xavier Schepler (1) , Stefan Balev (2) , Sophie Michel (3) , Eric Sanlaville (2)

1 LIMOS - Laboratoire d'Informatique, de Modélisation et d'optimisation des Systèmes
2 RI2C - LITIS - Equipe Réseaux d'interactions et Intelligence Collective
3 LMAH - Laboratoire de Mathématiques Appliquées du Havre

This paper introduces an optimization model of a multi-terminal, multi-modal maritime container port, such as the ones in the European northern range. The decisions concern the scheduling of ships, trains and trucks on terminals, while limiting inter-terminal transport of containers and minimizing weighted turnaround time. Heuristics based on the decomposition of the resulting mixed-integer program are proposed and tested on realistic generated instances with up to four terminals. The efficiency of the restrict-and-fix heuristic allows to investigate the impact of a global management on port's performance: an average improvement of 5% was observed.

Keywords: maritime container port management; multi-terminal optimization; mixed-integer programming; structural decomposition; mixed-integer programming based heuristic

Domains: Computer Science [cs]; Operations Research [cs.RO]

Xavier Schepler, Stefan Balev, Sophie Michel, Eric Sanlaville. Global planning in a multi-terminal and multi-modal maritime container port. Transportation Research Part E: Logistics and Transportation Review, 2017, 100, pp.38-62. ⟨10.1016/j.tre.2016.12.002⟩. ⟨hal-02112073⟩