The encyclopedia · Engineering & Operations · Operational decision · 2022–2025
Taicang Port's scheduler adds ~$5.66M a year by cutting ship waiting
A mixed-integer model plus adaptive large neighborhood search replaced manual ship scheduling at Taicang Port, cutting waiting times.
Taicang Port
the move
Taicang Port, one of China's largest inland ports, receives so many ships that its narrow, busy channels become congested. Scheduling was done manually, and fluctuating arrivals made it hard to keep ships moving.
Researchers built a mixed-integer programming model that captures ship types, routes, scheduling priorities and berthing rules, and solved it with a customized adaptive large neighborhood search. The algorithm was validated against Gurobi and against the port's manual schedules.
The resulting intelligent scheduling system replaced manual planning at the container terminal, cutting ship waiting times and uncompleted ships. It is quantified as about $5.66 million in additional revenue in one year.
why it works
- Manual scheduling cannot see the interaction between arrivals, channels and berths at once.
- Encoding realistic priorities and berthing rules made the optimizer's output usable without rework.
- Adaptive large neighborhood search solved a problem exact solvers could not handle at operational speed.
- Visualization and centralized data turned the model into a management tool, not just a schedule generator.
what transfers
When the bottleneck is coordination, replace the manual process with an optimizer, not more rules.
what came after
The system was piloted at Suzhou Modern Terminal of Taicang Port, where it saved about $0.512 million per year in labor and loss costs and generated the roughly $5.66 million annual revenue increase. The Taicang Port Administrative Committee uses the system to view and supervise operations, and the approach informs further intelligent port development.
references
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