Stacking strategy design and simulation for export containers arriving at port in random sequence

To reduce the reshuffle rate for the container yard,a stacking strategy is studied for the export containers which arrive at port in a random sequence under the condition that the containers' attributes are known before the ship arrives.On the basis of analyzing the existing stacking strategies for export containers,an improved stacking strategy is proposed which takes the ground slot as allocation unit,and the steps of the strategy are elaborated.The assumptions,evaluation indices and components are given,and the simulation model of the container yard is built to analyze the effect of different stacking strategies by the simulation software Flesxsim.A container terminal is taken as an example for the simulation analysis.The results show that the reshuffle rate brought by the improved stacking strategy is much lower than that brought by any other existing stacking strategy under the same container yard utilization which is higher than 70%.