Name: JONAS PALUCI BARBOSA
Type: MSc dissertation
Publication date: 25/03/2020
Advisor:
Name |
Role |
|---|---|
| RODRIGO DE ALVARENGA ROSA | Advisor * |
Examining board:
| Name |
Role |
|---|---|
| MACKSUEL SOARES DE AZEVEDO | Internal Examiner * |
| RODRIGO DE ALVARENGA ROSA | Advisor * |
Summary: The iron ore pellet is one of the main inputs of the steel industry. This commodity is produced in large volumes in a continuous and uninterrupted way, being stored in yard locations until its transportation to the consumer market. In this work, the maritime mode of transport is considered. Given that the process is continuous and uninterrupted, before starting production, there should be enough space in the storage
yards for the produced material. Stopping the production due to lack of available area in the yard entails significant financial impacts. Thus, efficient management of the storage yard is required. In order to free up space in the yard, allowing an ininterrupt production, planning the port line-up is necessary to withdraw the cargo from the yard at the required frequency. Therefore, the port line-up planning should be integrated to
the assignment of storage yard locations for bulk cargo, so that the production plan of the pelletizing plant is met. In the literature, the problems that concerns the planning of port line-up and the assignment of yard locations are denominated, respectively, Berth Allocation Problem (BAP) and Yard Assignment Problem (YAP). The integration of both problems, considering the fulfillment of the production plan in a pelletizing plant, was only found in one research, which proposed a mathematical model. However, given the nature of the problem, classified as NP-Hard, solving the problem by means of a commercial solver was not able to solve large instances in a reasonable time for practical usage. Thus, in this research, a meta-heuristic was developed to solve the port line-up planning integrated to the assignment of storage yard locations, aiming to fulfill the production plan of the pelletizing plant. The proposed meta-heuristic was able to solve all instances in less than three minutes, obtaining, at least, sub-optimal solutions in small instances and surpassing the solver generated solution in most large
instances. The quality of the solutions, coupled with significantly low execution times, allows to attest the applicability of the developed meta-heuristic.
Keywords: Berth Allocation Problem; Yard Assignment Problem; Integrated planning; Bulk cargo ports; Pelletizing plants.
