| Nowadays, a large number of cargo vessels arrive at ports and need to be serviced on a daily basis. This creates a hard to solve problem related to finding the most efficient order to service these vessels. In this context, we study the problem of scheduling the service of cargo vessels arriving at a single port and considering certain spatial and temporal constraints. We propose an optimal scheduling algorithm and two equivalent greedy ones. The optimal algorithm is based on Integer Linear Programming (ILP). The first greedy approach is a First Come First Served (FCFS) heuristic algorithm, meaning that whichever vessel arrives first at the port will be served first. The second greedy algorithm, which we refer to as "Smart'' applies a heuristic mechanism, that considers vessels' latest preferred departure time from the port after being serviced and the maximum unloading/loading speed of each dock. Through a detailed evaluation that uses realistic data, we observe that the optimal algorithm outperformed the two greedy ones in terms of the average waiting time, delay, and unloading times of vessels to be serviced, but with a significantly higher execution time. |
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