Abstract
Under the constraints of limited spaces and imbalanced traffic volumes (for both in and out directions) of container gates, reversible lane layouts become an economical and practical way to improve the service level of container terminal systems and make the maximum use of the current terminal resources. Together with a consideration of minimized total costs (both construction and operating) of terminal gate system, this paper first developed an optimization model to decide the number and scheduling rules of the reversible lanes at a terminal gate. A metaheuristic algorithm was built to solve the optimal model. Meanwhile, to reflect the randomness and dynamics property of the terminal gate system in practice, parameters that cannot be calculated from conventional analytic methods are obtained through a simulation model. Finally, a hub container terminal in the northeast of China was employed to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method and provide a theoretical foundation for the construction and management of terminal gate systems.
Highlights
With the continuous increase of containers’ throughput, terminal gates have become the bottleneck of restricting the development of container terminals
The total costs of the container terminal gate system corresponding to each solution can be calculated through Expression (1)
This paper proves the necessity of setting reversible lanes (RLs), which can efficiently alleviate the congestion at the container terminal gate and improve the service level of the terminal gate
Summary
With the continuous increase of containers’ throughput, terminal gates have become the bottleneck of restricting the development of container terminals. Congestion issues at container terminal gates can be alleviated by increasing the number of service lanes. Smart transformation of existing terminal gates from the perspective of operational management has become a more practical and economical way to solve the current problems. It naturally raises a question: how should the service lanes at smart container terminal gate be allocated and scheduled so that the total costs of construction and operation of the gate system are minimized?. Considering the imbalanced traffic volumes in two directions, they wonder whether it is necessary to build some RLs at the container gate.
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