The Direct Ship-to-Ship Container Transshipment at a Maritime Container Terminal

Transshipment operations at a maritime container terminal are usually implemented according to the ship-yard-ship cycle. The sojourn time of the containers in the yard is in general sufficiently long to guarantee that the loading and discharging operations can be scheduled independently. Terminal planners are recently considering the feasibility of a new operational modality, called live connection. In this modality a discharged container is immediately transshipped to the outgoing vessel, completely skipping the yard storage phase. Live connection assumes a partial overlapping of the berthing time windows of the involved ships, whose discharging/loading phases are no longer independent. In this paper we introduce the Direct ship-to-ship Container Transshipment Problem (DCTP) and derive a Mixed Linear Integer formulation.