METAHEURISTIC APPROACHES FOR THE BERTH ALLOCATION PROBLEM

Abstract

Berth Allocation Problem incorporates some of the most important decisions that have to be made in order to achieve maximum efficiency in a port. Terminal manager
of a port has to assign incoming vessels to the available berths, which need to be loaded/unloaded in such a way that some objective function is optimized. It is well known that even simpler variants of Berth Allocation Problem are NP-hard, and thus, metaheuristic approaches are more convenient than exact methods since they provide high-quality solutions in reasonable computational time. Metaheuristics are general frameworks used to build heuristic algorithms for hard optimization problems. In this paper, an overview of promising and widely used metaheuristic methods in solving dierent variants of Berth Allocation Problem is presented.
Keywords: Container terminal, Assignment of vessels, Heuristic optimization, High-quality sub-optimal solutions.