Vessel Service Planning in Seaports

An Integrated Approach to Managing Vessel Service in Seaports Efficient vessel service is of utmost importance in the maritime supply chain. When serving a group of incoming vessels, berth allocation and pilotage planning are the two most important decisions made by a seaport. Although they are closely correlated, the berth allocation problem and pilotage planning problem are often solved sequentially, leading to suboptimal or even infeasible solutions for vessel services. In “Vessel Service Planning in Seaports,” Wu, Adulyasak, Cordeau, and Wang focus on a vessel service planning problem that optimizes berth allocation and pilotage planning in combination. To solve the joint problem, the authors develop an exact solution method that combines Benders decomposition and column generation within an efficient branch-and-bound framework. They also propose acceleration strategies that significantly improve the performance of the algorithm. Test instances from one of the world's largest seaports are used to validate the effectiveness of the approach and demonstrate the value of integrated planning.