If this book is delivered to you as a hard copy, you may read it on a paper made from Canadian woods manufactured in USA paper mills, while you drink a fine Brazilian coffee beside a delicious British biscuit. If you read the book as a soft copy, most likely you use an electronic device whose monitor was manufactured in South Korea, its processor was fabricated in China and its hard drive was made in Thailand. Globalization is the process of worldwide interchange of products, money, ideas and culture. In fact, globalization started hundreds of years ago, when merchants started to trade commodities all around the known world from China to Persia, and from India to Rome. Ships from Europe sailed round the southern tip of Africa to reach India, China and Persian coasts. However, in the late 19th Century, large-scale international connections among the economies all around the world were expanded very quickly, most likely due to advances in transportation. Maritime transportation, new worldwide maritime routes (after digging the Suez and Panama Canals), and larger ships are among the most important reasons for this boom in globalization.

Maritime transportation requires large capital investments in ships, seaports and post-port transportation. A small percentage reduction in the expenses of a shipping operator or a seaport authority leads to millions of dollars savings that can be invested in further expansion. Expansion of maritime transportation capacity and world trade development depend on and support each other. Therefore, many planning and scheduling problems need to be addressed in order to use maritime transportation in a more efficient and more cost-effective manner. The recent growth of ships’ size has led to drastic reductions in maritime transportation costs. Nowadays, the largest containerships can carry up to 21,000 TEUs. For such a ship, 9,000 handling moves are expected for a 24-hour cycle time, or 375 handling moves per hour. This is more than twice the current productivity in the major container terminals in the world. Such a doubling of productivity will require dramatic innovation in the handling systems and operational methods.

New technologies in the seaports allow the operators to pursue loading and unloading tasks for the ships, simultaneously. Furthermore, the new handling equipment in seaports is capable of handling two or more containers at the same time. However, further technology and equipment innovation is not expected to provide a much higher productivity for the seaports. Thus, innovative planning and scheduling methods are critical for the successful performance of seaports. To add to this, higher environmental concerns by governments and societies all around the world, as well as increasing fuel prices, pressure the ship owners and operators into quicker turnarounds, and more efficient travel. Evidently, all parties involved in maritime transportation are forced (and enthusiastic) to optimize the operations that deal with maritime transportation.

This book is dedicated to the major optimization problems related to maritime operations both at sea and in ports. However, problems regarding the transportation from the ports to the final customer are beyond the scope of this book. Most of them are known to be NP-hard problems, and thus a considerable part of the studies addressing them focus on developing (meta)heuristic algorithms.

Many of the problems and issues presented in this book have been researched in two directions, namely the management side and the optimization side. Although we defined the problems from the management point of view, the main concern of the book is the optimization side of the problems, rather than the managerial one. Moreover, for most of these problems, several versions of the problem and problem definitions have been reported in the literature; however, for each problem here, a simple and widely accepted version of a mathematical model is reviewed. We describe a general version of the problem and then review some of the solution methods proposed in more detail. Regarding the notation, for consistency we use the same throughout the book, thus ignoring authors’ notations when reviewing specific works. In addition, and still having in mind the book’s consistency, in some cases, the mathematical model is presented in a slightly different way, though equivalent to the one originally proposed. A final note goes to the pseudocodes given throughout the book; they were taken from the work being reviewed and their presentation adapted for consistency or written whenever not provided by the authors.

Although we list some of the related literature for each problem, a literature review is not the prime objective of this book. We only searched for studies that are directly related to the optimization problems in any maritime transportation; among them, only studies that propose metaheuristics have been considered. Owing to space limitations, we selected some comprehensive works published in English and in refereed journals or edited volumes, using criteria such as a full description of the proposed algorithm, algorithm simplicity and data availability. Since the metaheuristic approach, the design process and structure are top of our concerns, approaches using commercial software packages or other optimization predefined tool boxes are not considered here. Regarding some of the specific maritime operation problems discussed in Chapters 3–5, due to space limitations, we will review one work with state-of-the-art results, in detail.

The target audience of this book are expert practitioners and researchers who seek a basic, but integrated overview of maritime operations and transportation, and the related optimization problems.

The book consists of five chapters; two of a more introductory nature and three on the main specific optimization problems that arise in maritime operations. Chapter 1 provides the motivation for addressing maritime operation problems, as well as a short overview of the main problems. Chapter 2 introduces the basic principles of metaheuristics and provides a brief explanation of the most commonly used ones. Chapter 3 is dedicated to the optimization problems related to ships and it includes network design problems both for liner and for tramp ships and speed optimization in green ship routing problems. Chapter 4 is on seaside operations in seaports, in which we review berthing time allocation, berthing space allocation, crane assignment and integrated berth allocation. Finally, in Chapter 5, the works related to the operations in the storage yard are reviewed. It includes but is not limited to storage space allocation and crane scheduling problems. As a pioneering way of innovation and improvement in the port throughput, we dedicated a large portion of Chapter 5 to integrated planning and scheduling problems.