The continuous Berth Allocation Problem: A Greedy Randomized Adaptive Search Solution

In this research, continuous and dynamic Berth Allocation Problem (BAP) is studied to minimize the total weighted flow time. Different from previous studies on continuous BAP, an efficient method is proposed to address the problem to identify the possible locations for next vessel in the Time-space diagram. Then two versions of Greedy Randomized Adaptive Search Procedure (GRASP) are developed to search for near optimal solutions. Both small and large scale numerical experiments are tested to examine the effectiveness of the proposed GRASPs by comparison with CPLEX and stochastic beam search, respectively. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.