Optimizing ship traffic scheduling in LNG ports: An enhanced model incorporating navigation characteristics and night sailing risks

The rapid growth of global liquefied natural gas (LNG) trade and increasing demand for LNG transportation have heightened the need for efficient ship scheduling in ports with LNG facilities. This study addresses these challenges by proposing a mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) model to minimize ship waiting times, incorporating LNG carriers' unique navigation characteristics such as mobile safety zones, one-way navigation, and night navigation risks. An enhanced simulated annealing genetic algorithm (ISAGA) is developed to optimize modeling efficiency. To validate the proposed method, an empirical study was conducted using ship trajectory data from the Dapeng Bay Port Area of Shenzhen as a case study. Findings indicate that allowing nighttime sailing can facilitate the port to accommodate more LNG ships under current berth constraints. Meanwhile, when the port has at least 50 general ship visits and 3 LNG carrier visits, nighttime sailing significantly reduces the waiting time of the ships, and the proposed ISAGA-based approach improves the scheduling efficiency by 22.24 % as compared to the traditional First-Come-First-Served (FCFS) approach. These findings underscore the potential of the proposed method to enhance LNG port operations efficiency, particularly under growing demand.