A solution procedure for the Direct ship-to-ship Container Transshipment Problem

At a maritime container terminal, containers discharged from a vessel are usually stored in the yard, and then loaded on different vessels. Here we consider the case of two ships, simultaneously berthed at the quay, assuming that some of the containers discharged from each of them must be directly loaded into the other. Our aim is to schedule all the vessel operations and decide the stowage positions for the exchanged containers, so as to minimize their storage time and the overall service time. For this problem we present a heuristic procedure and discuss some computational results.