Disruption Management-Based Coordinated Scheduling for Vessels and Ship Loaders in Bulk Ports

For ensuring the orderly operation of the port, it is vital to coordinately schedule available ship loaders and vessels that plan to enter and exit the port when ship loaders are unable to work due to faults. Therefore, this paper studies the coordination between vessels and ship loaders scheduling problem affected by failed ship loaders (VSLPB), and proposes a novel disruption management-based method to address this problem. An innovative optimization model is developed to reduce the generalized cost with the constraints of disruption management strategies (DMS), aiming to minimize the impact of failed ship loaders on the coordinated scheduling and the bulk cargo handling efficiency. For solving the VSLPB, an effective two-stage row generation (TSRG) algorithm is developed. In the first stage, the disruption conditions in the model are released to find the available ship loaders and berths for vessels affected by the failure factors. In the second stage, the optimal strategy is sought among multiple DMS to minimize the objective function value. Using the proposed method in Huanghua Coal Port as a case study, the results show that our method can effectively solve the impact of ship loader failure on the efficiency of bulk cargo handling and the efficiency of vessels entering and leaving the port. These further highlights the importance of implementing DMS, and show that the proposed method can provide an efficient and reliable solution for port production and operation to deal with disruption problems. Furthermore, the proposed method in this paper can help improve the ability of the port to resist uncertain factors, thus improving the ability of the entire supply chain to resist risks.