SCHEDULING ALGORITHMS FOR MOBILE HARBOR: AN EXTENDED M-PARALLEL MACHINE PROBLEM

Abstract

Mobile Harbor is a movable floating structure with container loading/unloading equipment on board. Mobile Harbor is equivalent to a berth with a quay crane in a conventional port, except that it works with a container ship anchoring on the open sea. A Mobile Harbor-based system typically deploys a fleet of Mobile Harbor units to handle a large number of containers, and operations scheduling for the fleet is essential to the productivity of the system. In this paper, a method to compute scheduling solutions for a Mobile Harbor fleet is proposed. Jobs are assigned to Mobile Harbor units, and their operations sequence is determined, with an objective of minimizing the sum of completion times of all container ships. This problem is formulated as a mixed integer programming (MIP) problem, which is modified from an m-parallel machine problem. A heuristic approach using Genetic Algorithm is developed to obtain a near optimal solution with reduced computation time.