A decision model for berth allocation under uncertainty

This paper studies the berth allocation problem (BAP) under uncertain arrival time or operation time of vessels. It does not only concern the proactive strategy to develop an initial schedule that incorporates a degree of anticipation of uncertainty during the schedule's execution, but also studies the reactive recovery strategy which adjusts the initial schedule to handle realistic scenarios with minimum penalty cost of deviating from the initial schedule. A two-stage decision model is developed for the BAP under uncertainties. Moreover, a meta-heuristic approach is proposed for solving the above problem in large-scale realistic environments. Numerical experiments are conducted to validate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.