Planning container transfers in a multi-terminal port: models, methods and preliminary results

International audienceIn the worldwide transport network, container ports act as intermodal interfaces, where containers are transferred between mother vessels, feeder vessels, river barges, trains and trucks. Nearby container ports are competing for traffic. Different factors have been identified as contributing positively to the attractiveness of a port, among which the operational efficiency of its terminals, and its connections to hinterland. New critical questions arise from the increase of vessel sizes, the contention of service roads, the urge for massified, cleaner transport modes. Container terminal operations have received considerable attention in the literature in recent years. Most of the studies focus on one isolated problem that occurs in one terminal, e.g. berth planning, quay crane scheduling, storage space allocation, etc. Only a few studies consider globally the flow of containers through several terminals in a port. However, a better partitioning of the workload between terminals, and the use of specialized terminals or platforms to help massifying the flows, may significantly improve the enlarged port competitiveness. This presentation proposes a multi-periodic tactical model to handle vessels, barges, trains, trucks and their containers over several cooperating terminals. The problem is formulated as a mixed-integer linear program. We will present results on more than 2000 instances with direct solving by a state of the art solver, with a relax-and-fix heuristic, and with a pre-assignment heuristic. Almost 98% of the 1600 instances with one fully-multimodal terminal or two specialized terminals are solved in less than 2 hours by the solver. Other instances require the use of heuristics