A two-phase optimization research for container yard planning

With the development of containerization, the need for optimization in container terminal operation has become more and more important in recent years. A reasonable container yard planning will not only benefit the efficiency of container yard itself, but also improve the efficiency of terminal handling system. In this paper, a two-phase framework of container yard planning is proposed. At the first phase, a hybrid tabu search based on balancing dynamically the workload of terminal equipment is generated to solve the yard allocation problem. Then, a mix-integer programming model, which considers various terminal resources, is developed to further solve the slot allocation problem for operated containers in storage yards. Finally, numerical experiments are conduced to valid this framework of container yard planning.