Optimizing Yard Crane Deployment and External Truck Appointments at a New Container Terminal: The Port of Beirut

This paper describes how, in many modern terminals, large cranes called Rubber Tyred Gantry Cranes (RTGs) carry out the storage or retrieval of a container in or from a storage yard block. As the workload under these cranes changes over time, optimizing their number in each block and distributing the total workload among blocks as efficiently as possible during gate operating hours contribute to more efficient yard operations and represent the main objective of this research. This paper describes a proposed approach for optimizing truck appointments and RTG deployment in the case of Beirut Container Terminal (BCT).