Scheduling of vessel movements in channel constrained ports

Overview

International trade is heavily reliant on maritime transportation which constitutes 80% of total volume. Ports have a significant impact on the efficiency of maritime transportation, with significant delays to vessels observed in accessing or departing ports. These delays can be a result of constraints on wharf capacity, channel capacity, access to tugs and pilots, or a combination of these factors. This project will focus on the development of novel operations research techniques to optimise the efficiency of scheduling vessel movements in channel constrained ports, with consideration of ancillary resources (e.g. tugs and pilots).

Research activities

Students will be formulating mathematical models of the studied problem, along with developing and implementing solution techniques.

Outcomes

The main outcomes of this project will be to develop academic publications for high quality journals.

Skills and experience

Candidates should have a solid grounding in mixed-integer programming along with exact and approximate solution techniques, along with standard software such as CPLEX, Gurobi or other solvers. Strong programming capabilities are also required with general purpose languages such as C++,C# or C, along with Python.

Scholarships

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Keywords

• scheduling
• maritime transport
• mixed integer programming
• metaheuristics

Contact

Contact the supervisor for more information.