The impact of time windows constraints on metaheuristics implementation: a study for the Discrete and Dynamic Berth Allocation Problem

This paper describes the development of a mechanism to deal with time windows constraints. To the best of our knowledge, the time windows constraints are difficult to be fulfilled even for state-of-the-art methods. Therefore, the main contribution of this paper is to propose a new computational technique to deal with such constraints. Such technique was tested combined with two metaheuristics to solve the discrete and dynamic Berth Allocation Problem. The technique ensures obtaining feasible solutions in terms of vessels time windows constraints, which are treated as hard constraints. A data set generator was created, resulting in a diversity of problems in terms of time windows constraints. A detailed computational analysis was carried out to compare the performance of both metaheuristics considering the technique.