The Berth Allocation Problem at Container Terminals with Fuel Consumption Considerations, Case Study: Iranian Rajaee Port

Container terminals are complex systems in which critical decision-making processes related to maritime logistics operations take place at them. Allocating incoming ships to the berths is the most important problem for port managers. Besides, over the past two decades, the container shipping industry has experienced rapid and continuous growth, which has made the issue of fuel consumption by ships one of the most important concerns of the International Maritime Organization (IMO).  Therefore, this paper intends to consider the issue of optimizing the allocation of berths in a situation where fuel consumption is considered by the port operators and shipping lines. To investigate this, the Iranian Shahid Rajaee port was selected. Based on the physical and operational characteristics of the case study we proposed a multi objective optimization model. This model was solved using the exact Augmented Epsilon Constraint (AEC) method. Given the NP-Hard complexity of the proposed model, the NSGA-II (Non-Dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm-II) meta-heuristic algorithm has also been used for solving real-world large-size instances. Finally, the results and statistical analyzes illustrate the good performance of the proposed multi-objective mathematical model to reduce the waiting time of ships and their fuel consumption.