The strategic berth template problem

•We study a strategic berth scheduling problem called the strategic berth template problem.•We develop heuristic algorithms to find a better approximate solution for the strategic berth template problem.•The algorithms perform well for the strategic berth template problem.

A marine container terminal operator may have a situation with excessive calling requests to be served especially when some new service contracts are under consideration. For this situation, we propose a strategic berth template problem (BTPS) that selects the ships among the requesting ones to be served and arrange their berth-windows within a limited planning horizon. The BTPS employs the subgradient optimization procedure, which is an improved version of the procedure that the authors developed for the operational berth allocation problem. A wide variety of numerical experiments indicate the improved subgradient procedure works well for the BTPS.