Swarm Intelligence and Bio-Inspired Computation

The container terminals (CTs) are designed to provide support to the continuous changes in the containerships. The most common schemes used for dock management are based on discrete and continuous locations. The consideration of continuous location in the CT allows arriving every container ship to the port independently of its size and dimensions. This work addresses the berth allocation problem with continuous dock, which is called dynamic berth allocation problem. We propose a mathematical model and develop a heuristic procedure based on a genetic algorithm to solve the corresponding mixed integer problem. Allocation planning aims to minimize the service time for each ship according to the berth and quay crane scheduling. Experimental analysis is carried out for the port of Algeciras that is the most important CT in Spain.