Dedicated Berths Assignment Problem Based On Cooperation Of Multiple Liner Carriers

With the promotion of economic globalization and the "One Belt and One Road" strategy,the container handling capacity of port is constantly improving,and it plays an important role in land and sea transportation in international trade.To meet the growing demand for transportation,ports urgently need to improve their service levels.This means that the port not only needs to improve the construction of facilities,but also needs to improve the level of management.Berth is known as an important port facility because of the high cost of construction and the limited resources of the coastline.Therefore,it is necessary to carry out scientific management for berths.On the one hand,liner carriers hope that the port operator will assign sufficient berths for ships arriving in port to reduce the waiting time costs of ships in port,and to avoid delays in delivery of goods to final customers.On the other hand,the assignment of excessive berths by port operators will reduce the utilization rate of berths and increase the operating cost of berths.How to analyze the port berth system scientifically,and assign a reasonable number of berths is the key point of optimizing the port operation.According to the literature summary,previous studies on berths mainly focus on the berth allocation problem.They abstract the problem by constructing integer programming model.Different from the common berth considered in the berth allocation problem,this paper studies the dedicated berth using only by certain liner carriers.In addition,a Korean scholar studies the cooperation among liner carriers for sharing yard storage spaces and the stability of liner carriers' cooperation.Similarly,under a cooperation environment,this paper considers that liner carriers form clusters and the dedicated berths are shared among liner carriers within the same cluster.This means that arriving ships will be distinguished between different clusters of liner carriers.Based on the above background,a special berth allocation problem is put forward,which investigates how to group multiple liner carriers into different clusters and how to determine the assignment of the dedicated berths for each cluster of liner carriers.The main research work and contributions of this paper are described as follows.Firstly,route schedule data of different liner carriers are collected,and the distributions of ship arrival times and port service times are investigated by using Pearson's Chi-squared Test.Secondly,this paper presents a three-stage optimization method to solve the proposed problem.In stage I,a queuing theory approach is used to determine the number of dedicated berths for serving the ships of different liner carriers.In stage II,the core theory is used to analyze the results of stage I,and stable clusters are determined among different liner carriers.In stage ?,0-1 programming is constructed to determine the optimal clustering.Finally,the Singapore port is selected to carry on the analysis,and the optimal numbers of dedicated berths which are assigned for different liner carriers by the port is obtained.Numerical results show that the cooperation between liner carriers has significant advantages.At the same time,a discrete event system simulation of port queuing is designed,and simulation results validate the rationality of our queuing theory approach.