Speaker: JIN Jiangang， Shanghai JiaoTong University

Date & Time:13:00-14:30, Fri. 2^nd, April 2021

Venue: Room 208, Tongji Building A 

Abstract:

In large container transshipment ports, terminals and depots are often located separately in a regional coastal area, requiring efficient inter-terminal container pick-up and delivery operations. Small vessels are usually employed for inter-terminal cargo movement tasks. Various port operational requirements, such as restricted opening time for shuttle vessels, cargo ready time and due time, should be satisfied. Therefore, a need exists for systematic approaches to developing efficient shuttle vessel operation routes and schedules to fulfill the cargo movement requests. In this paper, we study the shuttle vessel operation planning problem and develop two integer multi-commodity network flow models with side constraints. The first model is built upon a traditional time-space network with vessel flows and cargo flows modelled separately. Observing that cargo requests seldom pass through more than one intermediate stop, we represent the vessel activity explicitly in the network and propose an improved time-space-activity network flow model. Enhancement techniques are further employed to control the network size and strengthen the quality of the linear programming relaxation. Computational experiments are conducted and the results show that proposed network flow models are capable of finding effective operation plans in an efficient manner.