Berth allocation in an ore terminal with demurrage, despatch and maintenance

• A berth allocation problem encountered in a Brazilian ore terminal is presented.
• Maintenances and extra fees (demurrage) or rewards (despatch) are considered.
• A mixed integer linear programming model and real instances are proposed.
• An adaptive large neighborhood search (ALNS) heuristic is developed.
• Computational experiments indicate that ALNS consistently yields good solutions.

This paper presents a Berth Allocation Problem (BAP) encountered in an ore terminal located in a Brazilian port. The BAP consists of assigning ships to berthing positions along a quay in a port. In the Brazilian port considered here, maintenance activities have to be performed at the berths and extra fees (demurrage) or rewards (despatch) for the port administrator are incurred. We propose a mixed integer linear programming model for the problem and a set of instances based on real data in order to validate the model. An adaptive large neighborhood search (ALNS) heuristic is applied to solve the instances and computational experiments are performed. The results indicate that the ALNS heuristic yields good solutions on all instances.