Optimisation and heuristic approaches for assigning inbound containers to outbound carriers

Due to economical and/or geographical constraints, most of the time overseas containers cannot be directly shipped to their destinations. These containers visit transhipment ports where they are first unloaded and temporarily stored and then loaded onto smaller vessels (feeders) to be transported to...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Maritime policy and management Vol. 44; no. 7; pp. 825 - 836
Main Authors: Öztürk, Cemalettin, Sargut, F. Zeynep, Örnek, M. Arslan, Türsel Eliiyi, Deniz
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: Abingdon Routledge 03.10.2017
Taylor & Francis Ltd
Subjects:
Assignment
Capacity
container assignment
Container terminal operations
Containers
Costs
Destinations
Feeders
Heuristic
heuristic algorithm
integer programming
Maritime industry
Mathematical models
Objectives
Opportunity costs
optimisation
Ports
Production capacity
Production scheduling
Transportation
Variants
Vessels
ISSN:0308-8839, 1464-5254
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:Due to economical and/or geographical constraints, most of the time overseas containers cannot be directly shipped to their destinations. These containers visit transhipment ports where they are first unloaded and temporarily stored and then loaded onto smaller vessels (feeders) to be transported to their final destinations. The assignment of these containers to outbound vessels necessitates several factors to be taken into account simultaneously. In this paper, we develop a mathematical model to reflect multiple objectives with priorities and to assign these containers to different vessels at the transit container port terminal. Although we solve a single-objective (with the weighted sum of objectives) mathematical model to optimality, we also propose two heuristic approaches to solve this complex problem for a transit agency. The first heuristic is shipment based and has four variants differing in how the opportunity costs of the assignments are calculated. The second greedy heuristic is trip based, where the goal is to maximise the capacity utilisation of the vessels. The heuristics return very promising solutions in ignorable computational times. We also provide real-life cases and present our conclusions.
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ISSN:0308-8839
1464-5254
DOI:10.1080/03088839.2017.1341061