Yard planning for vessel services with a cyclical calling pattern

Abstract

In a land-scarce container terminal, congestions in the terminal yard due to highly concentrated workload often lead to unsatisfactory terminal productivity. Currently, yard planners use their experience to design a yard template for determining the storage locations of export containers to be loaded onto vessels deployed to services with a cyclical calling pattern. This article studies the problem of designing a yard template that balances the workload in an export yard. The template design problem is formulated as an integer program. It is found that the computational time required to optimally solve realistic sizes of the template design problem is unacceptably long. This article proposes a simpler integer program as an approximate model. On the basis of the analysis on the approximate model, a heuristic is developed to solve the template design problem. Results of computational experiments show that the heuristic can find effective solutions for the template design problem.

Keywords:

• yard planning
• yard template
• container terminal
• heuristic
• cyclical service

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank his former colleagues in PSA Corporation, Singapore, and Dr. Lai of Hongkong International Terminals Limited for many useful discussions. This research was supported by Hong Kong Research Grants Council General Research Fund (#715508).