Controlling Sea Tugs for Container Ships in a Tandem Sea Port

EasyChair Preprint 6983

Abstract

Background: The paper solves the problem of managing tugs for container ships in seaports. A tandem seaport consists of a roadstead, quays, container warehouses, port canals, port basins, a dispatch point and a tugboat base. Ships transport goods in containers from/to other ports. A standard, a weekly of ship service is given. Ships, between the roadstead and the quays, are transported by tugs. The tugs are assigned to shift-cycle transport tasks by the dispatcher. The ship can be unloaded/loaded at many quays. However, this requires tugs for ship transport between them. Containers are unloaded from ships to warehouses at the quays from where they are picked up by trains or TIRs. Similarly, containers are loaded onto ships from warehouses at the quays where they are delivered by trains or TIRs. The management system tugs should ensure the achievement of optimal economic results.

Methods: The presented problem was solved with the artificial intelligence method with the help of a computer program. The optimization criterion was the minimization of the ship service time in the port takes into account the limitations.

Results: A logistics system for the management of tugboats introducing container ships into the port has been developed. The system takes into account random disturbances: weather conditions, ship transport times, container unloading/loading times and the state of warehouses.

Conclusions: Managing multiple tugs in a port is a multi-agent system. The problem of controlling tugs is of the NP class. Each tugboat leaves/returns to the base for crew replacement, i.e. its route is <0,..., m,..., 0> where: 0 - the base and m - the quay/roadstead. Random handling times ξ_n become deterministic data t_n because the dispatcher only respects the execution of the task for the n-th ship.

Keyphrases: Container ship, Logistics, Optimization, Seaport, Tugboat

@booklet{EasyChair:6983,
  author    = {Zbigniew Frąckiewicz and Franciszek Marecki and Robert Bucki},
  title     = {Controlling Sea Tugs for Container Ships in a Tandem Sea Port},
  howpublished = {EasyChair Preprint 6983},
  year      = {EasyChair, 2021}}