Evaluation of the number of rehandles in container yards

The rehandling work influences the performance of transfer cranes significantly in a container terminal. The height and the width of a bay in the container stack are important decision variables in designing the storage configuration. And they are key factors which determine the average number of rehandles to pick up a container. In this paper, we propose a methodology to estimate the expected number of rehandles to pick up an arbitrary container and the total number of rehandles to pick up all the containers in a bay for a given initial stacking configuration. Simple tables and equations are provided to help the estimation of the number of rehandles.