The dynamic berth allocation problem for a container port

This paper addresses the problem of determining a dynamic berth assignment to ships in the public berth system. While the public berth system may not be suitable for most container ports in major countries, it is desired for higher cost-eectiveness in Japan’s ports. The berth allocation to calling ships is a key factor for ecient public berthing. However, it is not calculated in polynomially-bounded time. To obtain a good solution with considerably small computational eort, we developed a heuristic procedure based on the Lagrangian relaxation of the original problem. We conducted a large amount of computational experi-ments which showed that the proposed algorithm is adaptable to real world applications. Ó 2001 Elsevie