A Novel Wharf-based Genetic Algorithm for Berth Allocation Planning

For a commercial port, efficiently scheduling the vessels to the public berths is an important issue. In order to save communication and awaiting time of vessels, a wharf-based genetic algorithm is proposed to schedule the public berths. In the initialization process, the schedules are encoded as the chromosomes based on wharf characteristics to avoid assigning vessels to inappropriate wharves. After selection, crossover, mutation processes, the proposed wharf-based genetic algorithm adjusts the usage of wharves to increase the convergence speed. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can assign vessels to proper berths as soon as vessels arrive. Compared to the other algorithms, the proposed algorithm obtains 9 times faster than the best one of competing methods. Our wharf-based genetic algorithm obtains the best performance in convergence speed and quality of the solutions than all competing methods.