Efficient planning of berth allocation for container terminals in Asia

Berth allocation is essential for efficient terminal utilization in container ports, especially those in Asia. This paper is concerned with a berth allocation problem(BAP) that minimizes the sum of port staying times of ships and that minimizes dissatisfaction of the ships in terms of the berthing order. In general there exist tradeoffs between these objectives. An algorithm is presented to identify noninferior solutions to the BAP. The algorithm is demonstrated with some sample problems and the results indicate the importance of the problem in efficient terminal utilization.