A Simulation-based Optimization Approach for Integrated Port Resource Allocation Problem

In the last few years, the remarkable increase of containerized trade and the resulting increase in congestion and operating costs of container terminals have indicated the importance of integrated management of port resources. This research investigates an integrated decision problem that deals with the simultaneous optimization of berth allocation, tugboat and quay crane assignment. The main contributions of the work are the integrated simulation modelling of port resource allocation problem and proposing an effective evolutionary path re-linking algorithm to find a globally good solution for the problem. The effectiveness of the proposed evolutionary algorithm is tested on RAJAEE Port as a real case. The result demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed simulation-based optimization approach to find the near optimal solution within a reasonable time. The simulation experiment shows that the objective function value is affected significantly by the arrival disruptions and it is not sensitive to the variations of berth operation time.