Container Assignment and Yard Crane Deployment in a Container Terminal: A Case Study

Abstract

Vessels and seaports are an essential part of world trade and economy. Owing to soaring competition between the container terminals and pressure from shipping lines to shorten the vessel port stay, operations research techniques are continuously being developed to enhance terminal performance and efficiency. However, many of these studies only focus on a single area of the terminal operations, such as vehicle routing or berth planning. Although optimising the performance of each individual operation is fundamental to overall terminal efficiency, the interrelations between the various decisions should also be examined in detail as a decision taken in one area at an early stage may have a significant impact on downstream operations. The purpose of this paper is to develop a unified approach within which the container assignment and yard crane deployment problems arising within a given planning time horizon are considered simultaneously. We have developed a new mathematical formulation of the combined problem with the view to finding optimal container flows through the yard that minimise the overall storage and handling cost. The paper presents a description of the proposed modelling approach and a practical application for the Port of Felixstowe. Preliminary computational results are reported.