The berth allocation problem in terminals with irregular layouts

As international trade thrives, terminals attempt to obtain higher revenue while coping with an increased complexity with regard to terminal management operations. One of the most prevalent problems such terminals face is the Berth Allocation Problem (BAP), which concerns allocating vessels to a set of berths and time slots while simultaneously minimizing objectives such as total stay time or total assignment cost. Complex layouts of real terminals introduce spatial constraints which limit the mooring and departure of vessels. Although significant research has been conducted regarding the BAP, these real-world restrictions have not been taken into account in a general way. The present work proposes both a mixed integer linear programming formulation and a heuristic, which are capable of obtaining optimal or near-optimal solutions to this novel variant of the BAP. In order to assess the quality of the heuristic, which is being employed in a real tank terminal in Belgium, it is compared against the exact approach by way of randomly-generated instances and real-world benchmark sets derived from the tank terminal.