Storage allocation in transshipment hubs under uncertainties

Abstract

The state-of-the-art methods for yard storage allocation seldom consider uncertain factors, e.g. unexpected changes of loading/unloading time of vessels, workloads in each time shift, etc. All of these unforeseen events may reduce the efficiency of the initial plan and even render it infeasible. This paper firstly investigates the recovery strategy in yard storage allocation, which is the traditional way for handling uncertainties, whereas it could not be effective for universal situations and may fail in some complex circumstances. Thus, this paper proposes a real-time decision support system (DSS) which can act as an ultimate solution for coping with uncertainties in yard storage allocation process. This DSS is oriented to the planning for one time shift under the dynamic yard template, hence enables port operators to cope with flexible volume of arriving containers and uncertainties in the realistic circumstances. Some numerical experiments are performed to validate that the proposed real-time DSS has better performances than traditional methods in flexible and dynamic environments.

Keywords:

• scheduling
• port operations
• storage allocation
• container terminals
• transshipment hub

Acknowledgements

This research is supported by the Program for Professor of Special Appointment (Eastern Scholar) at Shanghai Institutions of Higher Learning, Shanghai Shu-Guang project (Grant No. 11SG40), the fellowship of Container Supply Chain Engineering Research Center and the fellowship of University, Young Teacher Supporting Program in Shanghai (Grant No. shu11006).

Notes

1. The fungible sub-blocks mean that they are all reserved for the same departing vessel.