Planning Shuttle Vessel Operations To Alleviate Congestion Problem In Large Container Terminals

With the significant growth of world economy and container transportation,large seaports are under the pressure of higher requirements for handling efficiency and often involved in recurrent congestion.For those large seaports,shuttle vessels are usually run between terminals in order to fulfill container inter-terminal transshipment demand as well as to alleviate seaports congestion effectively.This paper focuses on planning the shuttle vessel routing and scheduling,in which shuttle vessels connect a main terminal and neighboring terminals for container pickup.Two mixed-integer programming formulations are developed.The first model aims to minimize the total operational cost and the second further takes into account time windows requirement.A two-phase heuristic algorithm is devised to find near-optimal solution within short processing time for large scale problems.According to the computational results,the first model shows high searching efficiency if cargo owners don’t have time requirement.The two-phase heuristic algorithm shows both efficiency and effectiveness in searching the optimal solution of the second Model for large-scale instances considering time windows.The routing analysis indicates that terminal operators focus on geographical information or time window respectively when the waiting penalty shift from low to high.