Workload-based yard-planning system in container terminals

Traditionally, the yard-planning problem has been considered to be the assignment of yard spaces to arriving vessels in practices of container terminals. This study proposes an integrated decision-making framework for the yard-planning that simultaneously considers various resources such as storage space, yard cranes, and traffic area in container terminals for planning. The decision-making framework in this study is based on a mathematical model, which supports intelligent yard-planning activities considering work-loads on various related resources. Further, it is shown that the decision-making framework for the yard-planning can be extended to that for simultaneous decisions on yard plans and handling capacity of yard cranes per block. A heuristic algorithm is also proposed in order to reduce the computational time for planning. Numerical experiments are conducted to validate the models and algorithms proposed in this study.