Yard Template Generation in a Container Terminal Considering Time Requirement of Vessel Operation

Abstract

In recent years, the bottleneck of yard operation in container terminals has become more and more prominent. For resolving the departure delay problem of vessels, this paper proposes a mixed integer programming model considering the operation time requirements of vessels in a container terminal. It can optimize the yard template plan by reasonably arranging the number of loading clusters of each vessel in the yard, and meanwhile, enhance the efficiency of management in yard and lower the departure delay of vessels. Moreover, a case study is presented to illustrate the proposed model and sensitivity analysis is conducted in the numerical experiments to verify the effectiveness of the proposed model.