Research on Marine Loading Planning Problem based on Iterative Hierarchical Optimization Method

This paper studies on the marine loading planning problem. The objective of this problem is to determine the required vessels and the berth allocation plan with consideration on minimizing the amount of used vessels and overall loading time. Firstly, this problem is modeled as a multi-objective combinational optimization problem. It is transformed into an integer programming problem by using a weighting method. Secondly, this paper proposes an iterative hierarchical optimization method to search the near optimal solution for the combinatorial optimization problem. The optimization of the vessels selection plan and the allocation of vessels to berths are separately resolved. To improve the utilization of each vessel and reduce the overall amount of required vessels, the linear integer programming method is used. The grouped genetic algorithm is applied to find the optimal berth allocation plan. Finally, we demonstrate our algorithm in a large scale marine loading scenario. The experimental results show that our method could solve the complex marine loading planning problem effectively.