Scheduling ships movements within a canal harbor

In this paper we propose a model for the in-port ship scheduling problem that consists in scheduling the movement of ships inside a canal harbor. Our model, which we name RECIP-MILP, is inspired by a model for scheduling trains, to exploit the analogies between a canal harbor and a single track railway network. Moreover, we show how to translate spatial safety constraints into time ones. We apply our model to instances representing ship movements in the Port of Venice. We test the performance of both the exact RECIP-MILP model and a heuristic solution algorithm based on it. We show that we can exactly solve most instances in few minutes.