The dynamic berth allocation problem for a container port

This paper addresses the problem of determining a dynamic berth assignment to ships in the public berth system. While the public berth system may not be suitable for most container ports in major countries, it is desired for higher cost-effectiveness in Japan's ports. The berth allocation to calling ships is a key factor for efficient public berthing. However, it is not ca lculated in polynomially-bounded time. To obtain a good solution with consi derably small computational effort, we developed a heuristic procedure base d on the Lagrangian relaxation of the original problem, We conducted a larg e amount of computational experiments which showed that the proposed algori thm is adaptable to real world applications. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.