Multi-criteria evaluation of stacking yard configuration

Nowadays container terminals play a pivotally important role in the world. As a consequence of facing the global trend of containerization, this paper proposed a modification in yard layout configuration for terminal throughput improvement. In this regard, three different scenarios of container yard layout were considered in the paper. Site layout planning can affect productivity and is obviously crucial to project success. Because of many uncertainties, variables and variations, site layout planning is a typical multi-objective problem. Actually this shows the multi-criteria property of decision making. Since then we have considered fixed and variable cost, transfer cycle time, flexibility and stacking capacity as the performance indicators. We also employed analytical hierarchy process (AHP) to evaluate each alternative layout with respect to each of the criterion and finally prioritized all the alternatives.