Terminal allocation problem in a transshipment hub considering bunker consumption

Abstract

This article investigates the method of allocating arriving vessels to the terminals in transshipment hubs. The terminal allocation decision faced by a shipping alliance has the influence on the scheduled arrival time of vessels and further affects the bunker consumption cost for the vessels. A model is formulated to minimize the bunker consumption cost as well as the transportation cost of inter-terminal transshipment flows/movements. The capacity limitation of the port resources such as quay cranes (QCs) and berths is taken into account. Besides the terminal allocation, the QC assignment decision is also incorporated in the proposed model. A local branching based method and a particle swarm optimization based method are developed to solve the model in large-scale problem instances. Numerical experiments are also conducted to validate the effectiveness of the proposed model, which can save around 14% of the cost when compared with the "First Come First Served" decision rule. Moreover, the proposed solution methods not only solve the proposed model within a reasonable computation time, but also obtain near-optimal results with about 0.1∼0.7% relative gap.

Critical Literature Review into Planning of Inter-Terminal Transport: In Port Areas and the Hinterland

“…A proper assignment of deep-sea vessels may reduce the costs caused by ITT movements. Zhen et al [19] study the terminal assignment for the vessel considering fuel consumption, ITT, and storage cost. Hendriks et al [20] study a berth allocation problem among multiple terminals with an objective to minimize the quay crane operation cost and ITT cost.…”

Flexible ship loading problem with transfer vehicle assignment and scheduling

“…A terminal allocation problem with inter-terminal transhipment ows/movements, e.g. Zhen et al (2016a), can also be attached to these problems. Although a terminal with transfer vehicles is considered in the paper, the problem can be adapted to terminals with dierent yard transport equipment (e.g.…”

Optimal Container Routing in Liner Shipping Networks Considering Repacking 20 ft Containers into 40 ft Containers

“…Quantitative research on container terminal operations can be divided into studies on sea-side operations and studies on land-side operations. Sea-side decisions are mainly on berth allocation and quay crane assignment [12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19]. Landside problems are mainly yard storage area planning and allocation [20][21][22][23][24].…”

“…The domain of n, represented by set , is all vectors n in (19) that satisfy (8), (9), (10), (12), (14), (16), and (18).…”