Disruption Management Approaches for Berth Scheduling in Bulk Terminals

Maritime terminals are complex transportation systems sensitive to several sources of uncertainty. An alteration in the baseline planning, as a consequence of one or more disruptive events, can lead terminals to a lower quality of the service provided. Therefore, in a context where a terminal strives to maintain or increase competitiveness, it is necessary to consider the uncertainty in the planning and define actions capable of efficiently and effectively mitigating disruptive events. This paper addresses berthing operations at bulk terminals, considering the arrival and handling times as stochastic variables. Hybrid approaches (i.e., proactive-reactive) are proposed in order to provide the port terminal with robust planning capable of reducing the impact of disruptive events by defining uncertainty-tolerant schedules and reactive actions capable of restoring the performance of the terminal when disruptive events arise. Finally, the solution approaches are evaluated together with and without the incorporation of buffer-time management. The computational results corroborate the effectiveness of integrating proactive and reactive approaches in order to maximize the performance of the terminal and reduce the penalty costs derived from alterations in the baseline schedule, with the consequent increase in the terminal competitiveness.