Vessel arrival planning with full information

Abstract Planning efficiency and timely arrival of vessels is crucial to smooth operations of maritime transport networks, ensuring optimal utilization of resources and minimizing operational costs. Coordination between vessel operators and terminals has the potential to reduce costs, fuel consumption, and waiting time. We present a continuous speed optimization algorithm that minimizes total costs of all vessels together. We assume complete information on arrival and handling times to estimate the maximum cost savings that can be realized by cooperating vessels and terminals. Compared to constant speed sailing, the potential savings in costs are between 8% and 20%, depending on the scenario and cost parameters. In all scenarios tested, the optimal solution also offers lower fuel consumption and no waiting time for any vessel. The dynamic programming algorithm developed finds optimal solutions in quadratic time. Our clustering heuristic, although theoretically also quadratic, turns out to be much quicker and shows linear complexity.