Optimising vessel placements in anchorages with look-ahead and beam search strategies

Abstract

This project tackles the issue of efficiently placing incoming vessels into anchorages as they arrive and depart. Anchored vessels take up circular areas, while anchorages can be assumed to be fixed polygonal areas. Hence, the project can be seen as a variation of the circle packing problem with a temporal dimension. This project builds on existing work by novelly introducing a look-ahead time window to maximise information available when deciding on vessel placements and complements this approach with beam search strategies to manage the runtime of the algorithm. We measure the performance of our algorithm against other benchmark algorithms in the literature using five different performance metrics. Results indicate that our algorithm outperforms competing algorithms by obtaining reductions in risk of vessel collisions of up to 23% and reductions in fuel costs of up to 22%, while losses obtained in other performance metrics are relatively small (not exceeding 16%) and statistically insignificant in some cases.