Recent Advances on The Berth Allocation Problem

The intermodal transportation of goods by vessels has increased over the years. In this context, the Berth Allocation Problem arises and becomes fundamental to guarantee the efficiency of maritime terminals, deciding where and when to allocate the vessel over a planning horizon taking into account constraints of time and space. First a multi-objective approach is proposed based on an Evolutionary Metaheuristic. A lower bound based on a maximal flow problem was derived
in order to evaluate the quality of the solutions. Next Benders Decomposition algorithm and its variants are reviewed and applied to the BAP. Then, a hybrid optimization procedure based on Genetic Algorithm and Scatter Search is developed, and data envelopment analysis (DEA) is adopted to choose the efficient combination of the operators. This thesis proposes a problem generator for
the BAP. Instances have their difficulty analyzed and those classified as the most difficult are solved through two metaheuristics.