Finding an Optimal Route of a Consignment in a Seaport

• Seaport operations,
• metric of optimal routes,
• graph theory,
• cargo management,
• cargo operations

The paper describes the functioning of the seaport in terms of a consignment transshipment and transporting processes proceeding in it. Existing methods for presenting and modelling port activities, classical methods for finding optimal routes using the set-theoretic model, DEA method and Bellman's optimality principle are considered.The authors propose to consider the seaport as a graph, the nodes of which are warehouses and berths, and the sea road and land seaport gates are the endpoints for the cargo intraport routes.We propose in this study to decompose the route into separate transitions with the detection for the optimizing at each stage in accordance with the principles of dynamic programming. To determine the optimal transition, a metric of optimal routes has been developed. It is based on three main factors: the remoteness of the designated berth from the transition node (place, where transition is planned); total performance of technological lines selected for transshipment; total cost of cargo operations.Moreover, authors offer to use a system with a dynamic priority as appropriate one for planning operations of a universal cargo terminal, since use of dynamic priority allows to take into account changes in the external environment and internal terminal performance indicators, affecting the actual schedule of processes.