A model to design recreational boat mooring fields

This article develops a mathematical model and heuristic algorithm to design recreational boating mooring fields. The boating industry is important to the Florida economy, and boat storage is becoming a concern among those in the industry. The mooring field design problem is formulated to maximize the total number of boat feet moored in the mooring field. In the model, we allow two adjacent moorings to overlap, which introduces a risk that under certain conditions the boats on these moorings could contact each other. We identify the conditions when contact is possible and quantify the probability of contact. The mooring field design problem is formulated as a nonlinear mixed‐integer programming problem. To solve the problem, we decompose it into two separate models, a mooring radii assignment model and a mooring layout model, which are solved sequentially. The first is solved via exhaustive enumeration and the second via a depth‐first search algorithm. Two actual mooring fields are evaluated, and in both cases our model leads to better layouts than ones experts developed manually. The mooring field design model rationalizes the mooring field design and shows that in one case by increasing the risk from 0 to 1%, the mooring efficiency increases from 74.8% to 96.2%. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2009