Abstract
The ship placement problem constitutes a daily challenge for planners in tide river harbours. In essence, it entails positioning a set of ships into as few lock chambers as possible while satisfying a number of general and specific placement constraints. These constraints make the ship placement problem different from traditional 2D bin packing. A mathematical formulation for the problem is presented. In addition, a decomposition model is developed which allows for computing optimal solutions in a reasonable time. A multi-order best fit heuristic for the ship placement problem is introduced, and its performance is compared with that of the left-right-left-back heuristic. Experiments on simulated and real-life instances show that the multi-order best fit heuristic beats the other heuristics by a landslide, while maintaining comparable calculation times. Finally, the new heuristic's optimality gap is small, while it clearly outperforms the exact approach with respect to calculation time.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 387-398 |
Number of pages | 12 |
Journal | European Journal of Operational Research |
Volume | 235 |
Issue number | 2 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 1 Jun 2014 |
Externally published | Yes |
Keywords
- Decomposition
- Heuristics
- Lock scheduling
- Packing
- Ship placement problem