About Research Project
This project aims to investigate two practical and important tugboat scheduling problems for a given tugging service network of a large container port, namely, the static Tug Boat Scheduling (TBS) and the dynamic TBS.
For the static TBS, container ships are ready in anchorages and their berthing times as well as container handling times are known at the beginning planning horizon. The purpose of the static TBS is therefore to find an optimal schedule for the tugboats to tug all the container ships by minimizing the total turn-round time of these container ships subject to the minimum ship safety distance constraints and fundamental tugboat-to-ship rules.
As a remarkable extension of the static problem, the dynamic TBS assumes that some container ships are not ready when tugboats start to work in view of the uncertainty in container ship arrivals and their handling times. Note that the dynamic TBS is a new research topic while few studies directly applied the meta-heuristic methods to solve the static versions.
This project will first create bench marking examples and identify necessary parameters such as the minimum container ship safety distance and container ship arrival patterns for the static and dynamic TBS problems by using the Automatic Identification System data from the Singapore water and Singapore Strait. Tangible optimization models will be developed for both problems. The global optimization algorithms and heuristic methods will be designed and numerically tested for solving the models due to the NP-hardness of both problems. Finally, the models and algorithms will be programmed into a tugboat scheduling software.
