A stockyard planning problem

With over 100 millions tons of coal exported annually, the coal terminals at the Port of Newcastle are among the busiest in the world. To accommodate the anticipated rise in the export of coal in the next decade, effective stockyard management at the coal terminals will be essential. We have developed stockyard planning technology that can achieve substantially higher throughput levels. The technology intelligently combines greedy construction, enumeration, and integer programming. We demonstrate the efficacy of the technology on a variety of instances derived from real-life data and also show how the technology can be used to investigate the benefits of capacity expansion investments on throughput levels.