Planning shuttle vessel operations in large container terminals based on waterside congestion cases

With the significant growth of world economy and container transportation, large seaports are under the pressure of higher requirements for handling efficiency and often involved in recurrent congestion. For those large seaports, shuttle vessels are usually run between terminals in order to fulfill container inter-terminal transshipment demand as well as to alleviate seaports' congestion effectively. This paper focuses on planning the shuttle vessel routing and scheduling, in which shuttle vessels connect a main terminal and neighboring terminals for container pickup. Two mixed-integer programming formulations are developed. The first model aims to minimize the total operational cost and the second further takes into account the time window requirement. A two-phase heuristic algorithm is devised to find a near-optimal solution within the short computational time for large-scale problems. According to the computational results, the first model shows high searching efficiency if cargo owners do not have time requirement. The two-phase heuristic algorithm shows both efficiency and effectiveness in searching near-optimal solution of the second model for large-scale instances considering time windows. The routing analysis indicates that terminal operators focus on time or no-load rate, respectively, when the waiting penalty shift from low to high.