Integrated Berth Allocation and Yard Assignment in Bulk Ports using Column Generation

One of the primary modes for worldwide trade of goods is maritime transport, which is exposed to rapid growth. In order to handle the increase of the traffic in ports, optimization of port operations has been studied and implemented in the past. In container terminals, significant amount of work has been done in the field of large scale optimization. In published literature, the main focus lies in integration of berth allocation and quay crane assignment, since these problems are strongly related. On the other hand, literature of integration of yard assignment and berth allocation is relatively less studied and limited to container terminals. In this research, we study two crucial optimization problems of berth allocation and yard assignment in context of bulk ports. We discuss how these problems are interrelated and can be integrated and solved as a single large scale optimization problem. More importantly, we highlight the differences in operations between bulk ports and container terminals which calls the need to devise specific solutions for bulk ports. The objective is to minimize the total service times of vessels berthing at the port. We propose an exact solution algorithm based on column generation to solve the combined problem. The master problem is formulated as a set-partitioning problem, and the subproblem to identify columns with negative reduced costs is solved as a mixed integer program.