Flexible storage yard management in container terminals under uncertainty

Abstract

As the port bottleneck shifts from the shore side to the yard side, yard management is crucial to the operation efficiency of the container port. This paper studies the yard management problem in container terminals under the flexible storage strategy which does not fix the size of the storage templates in the yard. The problem considers the uncertainty of container demand and the flexibility of the block and jointly optimizes the storage space allocation, yard crane deployment, and container allocation problems. A two-stage stochastic optimization model under uncertainty is established to minimize the port operation cost. Two heuristic algorithms, a column generation-based heuristic algorithm and a tabu search algorithm, are proposed to solve the model. Numerical experiments validate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms. Furthermore, some management implications for port operators are proposed according to the results of sensitivity analysis experiments.