infonet-economy

This paper aims to develop a decision support system for bulk material handling ports in relation to ship scheduling and discrete berth allocation. Ship scheduling according to available discrete berths and to customer priority is a complex problem. A multiobjective formulation is then proposed to model the problem in minimizing ship waiting times and deviation of customer priority. An modified Non-sorting Genetic Algorithm (Mod-NSGA II) is proposed to solve the problem in large-scale realistic environments. Utility of the developed decision support system in achieving good utilization of the available berths and resources is demonstrated using illustrative scenarios inspired from a real port management case.