Efficient Heuristics for Optimization of a Container Terminal Yard

Container traffic has been growing steadily since the emergence of containerization and this trend is expected to continue. New massive containerships and scarcity of the yard land put an enormous pressure on port operators to meet the container traffic demand both effectively and efficiently. Recently, some port operators have introduced a new operational planning concept to reserve dedicated clusters for containers that will be loaded on each departing vessel. With this concept, we may enjoy the benefit of consignment with the reduced number of reshuffles, accommodate more yard cranes for each vessel to reduce the berthing time, as well as reduce traffic congestion in the yard and thereby improve the entire terminal operational efficiency. Based on this concept, in this paper, we study the container allocation problem assuming that the set of clusters reserved for each departing vessel has been decided. We want to allocate the arriving containers to avoid traffic congestion while minimizing the total number of yard cranes used. First we formulate this problem as a mixed-integer linear programming model and found it to be computationally infeasible for solving an actual size problem. To find a near-optimal solution in a reasonable time, one heuristic algorithm is proposed to solve it. Experiments show that the proposed model can be used to solve the container allocation problem for a moderate container terminal.