Scheduling vessels and container-yard operations with conflicting objectives

Abstract We consider the problem of coordinating the operations of two supply chain partners: a foreign shipping company and a domestic port. The two partners have conflicting business objectives, and the issue is to determine the optimal cycle time, by which the shipping company removes the empty containers from the domestic port, so that the joint profit of the two partners is maximized. The domestic port prefers a shorter cycle time to mitigate its empty container accumulation and land use problems, while the shipping company wishes a longer cycle time to save its expensive vessel capacities. We propose an iterative procedure to search for this optimal cycle time. In each iteration, a candidate cycle time is evaluated by solving a deterministic vessel scheduling problem and a stochastic container-yard capacity optimization problem. We prove the properties of the vessel scheduling problem, derive the optimality condition under which the vessel scheduling problem can be decomposed, and show that the profit function of the domestic port is convex and thus the optimal container-yard capacity can be determined efficiently. Empirical observations on the algorithm computational performance collected from over 300 randomly generated test cases under various problem settings are reported.