Allocating Quay in Optimal Layout Design for Mixed Queuing Systems in Marine Vessels Using a Quadratic Programming Formulation

In this paper, we use the dataset of a marine berthing structure per hour to construct the objective and linear constraint functions from the combination of a simple and non-preemptive queuing model, and we determine the optimal design of vessels and layout of quay through the solutions of quadratic programming problems. A methodology is proposed to formulate the quadratic programming problems from the input and output data of the mixed queuing model as the constraints on the characteristics of logistic demand, service time, waiting time, vessels, and layout of service quay for minimum utilization cost. This approach is applied to the port authority of Kribi in the south region of Cameroon to examine the more precise optimal solution with nonlinear complexities in the programs of discrete computer simulations. With adaptive experimental data of the modelling of berths as mixed models, the results provide the value of the most optimal solution projected in the port of Kribi compared to the solutions of integer and traditional linear programming problems. This study delivers the optimal number of vessel types and the associated layout in order of importance among the vessel types which can be safely moored for operations.