To quantify the impacts of tides on seaside operations in container ports, this study reformulates the berth allocation problem by modeling their impacts on the entrance/exit of vessels into/from ports. Furthermore, to mitigate the tidal impacts, we borrow the so-called virtual arrival policy, whose potential for reducing bunker fuel consumption and vessel emissions is widely recognized by the shipping industry, and accordingly retrofit the berth allocation model. In the latter model, the state-of-the-art technique of second-order cone programming is adopted to handle the nonlinear intractability involved. We conduct extensive numerical experiments to evaluate the impacts of tides on the seaside operations in a tidal container port, and also to verify the competence of the virtual arrival policy in delivering win–win economic and environmental benefits for both the port and shipping lines. It is also intriguing to observe that the virtual arrival policy would be an applicable substitute for the costly approach of deepening the navigation channel in a tidal port.

Item Type:	Refereed Article
Keywords:	berth allocation, tide, container port, fuel consumption, virtual arrival, second-order cone programming
Research Division:	Commerce, Management, Tourism and Services
Research Group:	Transportation and Freight Services
Research Field:	Transportation and Freight Services not elsewhere classified
Objective Division:	Transport
Objective Group:	Water Transport
Objective Field:	Port Infrastructure and Management
Author:	Du, Y (Dr Bill Du)
ID Code:	113326
Year Published:	2015
Web of Science® Times Cited:	22
Deposited By:	Maritime and Logistics Management
Deposited On:	2016-12-21
Last Modified:	2018-03-20
Downloads:	0