An Adaptive Ant Colony System Based on Variable Range Receding Horizon Control for Berth Allocation Problem

The berth allocation problem (BAP) is an NP-hard in maritime traffic scheduling that significantly influences the operational efficiency of container terminal. This paper formulates BAP as a permutation-based combinatorial optimization and proposes improved ant colony system (ACS) algorithm to solve it. proposed ACS has three main contributions. First, adaptive heuristic information (AHI) mechanism help handle discrete real-time difficulties BAP. Second, relieve computational burden, divide-and-conquer strategy based on variable-range receding horizon control (vRHC) designed divide complete into set sub-BAPs. Third, partial solution memory (PSM) accelerate convergence process each (i.e., sub-BAP). termed (AACS) with vRHC PSM mechanism. performance AACS comprehensively tested test cases different scales. Experimental results show effectiveness robustness are generally better than compared state-of-the-art algorithms, including well-performing evolutionary algorithm. Moreover, comprehensive investigations conducted evaluate AHI mechanism, strategy,