Reconfiguration Strategies for Mitigating the Impacts of Port Disruptions. Final Report

摘要

Marine terminals and ports are designed to meet expected demands during normal operations in order to facilitate the smooth and efficient movement of goods. Disruptive events may affect these normal operations, and terminals, ports and regions must be prepared to mitigate such disruptions in an effort to maintain the movement of goods. In this project, we investigate methods of modeling and evaluating the port disruptions and develop mitigation strategies for reducing the impacts of disruptions. The types of disruptions we study in this work are assumed to occur at the local and regional levels. We show that disruptions at the local level can be modeled as terminal allocation problems (TAP). The multi berth allocation problem is viewed as a set partitioning problem, in which each partitioned problem consists of a single berth allocation problem (BAP). Berth allocation is an essential logistics operation, since, the deployment of other resources at a terminal have to be coordinated with the berth allocation plan. The BAP is an NP-hard problem, and consequently heuristic methods based on sub gradient and simulated annealing algorithms are developed to find a near-optimal solution within a reasonable amount of time.