Patent Document ID: 8321354
Application ID: 11474317
Patent Flag: 1

Claim One:
1. A system that generates a schedule for delivery of products via an ocean-going vessel, the system comprising: a computer system comprising a processor that receives a schedule request and one or more constraints for scheduling one or more vessels; and an optimization engine tangibly embodied on the computer system, the optimization engine generating a schedule comprising one or more vessel assignments to one or more terminals based on the one or more constraints using: a beam search algorithm comprising a branch-and-bound algorithm with a greedy heuristic estimating the desirability of one or more nodes, the branch-and-bound algorithm uses possible vessel assignments as branches and orders terminal/product pairs according to criticality, the optimization engine further verifies short term feasibility of a vessel candidate using a backtracking algorithm and determines the one or more vessel assignments according to a recursive process that includes determining the feasibility of assigning each of a plurality of vessel candidates to the one or more terminals.