Short-Term Scheduling of Vessels for Shipping Bulk or Semi-Bulk Commodities Originating in a Single Area

We analyze a single-voyage ship-scheduling problem. A set of ships of different sizes and cost functions must be used to deliver a set of shipments to their destinations. The cost function that is minimized consists of the cost of ships' time and port charges, as this cost applies to the various terms of ships employment. We compare several algorithms for allocating shipments to ships, and achieve substantial cost savings as compared with industry practice. A biased random algorithm provides very good solutions that are close to the optimal ones.