Berth management in container terminal: the template design problem

One of the foremost planning problems in container transshipment operation concerns the allocation of home berth (preferred berthing location) to a set of vessels scheduled to call at the terminal on a weekly basis. The home berth location is subsequently used as a key input to yard storage, personnel, and equipment deployment planning. For instance, the yard planners use the home berth template to plan for the storage locations of transshipment containers within the terminal. These decisions (yard storage plan) are in turn used as inputs in actual berthing operations, when the vessels call at the terminal. In this paper, we study the economical impact of the home berth template design problem on container terminal operations. In particular, we show that it involves a delicate trade-off between the service (waiting time for vessels) and cost (movement of containers between berth and yard) dimension of operations in the terminal. The problem is further exacerbated by the fact that the actual arrival time of the vessels often deviates from the scheduled arrival time, resulting in last-minute scrambling and change of plans in the terminal operations. Practitioners on the ground deal with this issue by building (capacity) buffers in the operational plan and to scramble for additional resources if needs be. We propose a framework to address the home berth design problem. We model this as a rectangle packing problem on a cylinder and use a sequence pair based simulated annealing algorithm to solve the problem. The sequence pair approach allows us to optimize over a large class of packing efficiently and decomposes the home berth problem with data uncertainty into two smaller subproblems that can be readily handled using techniques from stochastic project scheduling. To evaluate the quality of a template, we use a dynamic berth allocation package developed recently by Dai et al. (unpublished manuscript, 2004) to obtain various berthing statistics associated with the template. Extensive computational results show that the proposed model is able to construct efficient and robust template for transshipment hub operations.