Due to the sharp increase of coal import in the recent years, nowadays coal terminals in China are heavily congested. Methods are called to ease the vessel queuing and add to the vessel turnover in these terminals. This study presents an idea of utilizing the extra spaces out of the quay boundary, which are treated as fake berths and capable to hold part of one vessel but offering no handling service. A tree-like searching model is proposed for the berth planning problem with the fake berths and a self-designed heuristic algorithm is used to solve the model. Numerical experiments are conducted to verify the effects of the idea.
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