Sequencing of container pickup trucks in container yard blocks

In cities where their scarce land supplies have to accommodate the gigantic capacitites of port container terminals, such as Hong Kong and Singapore, the containers to be loaded onto the same vessel are usually stacked together to form tall stacked blocks. In most container yards, only one working lane adjacent to each yard block is available for the empty trucks to queue up to receive the export containers. When loading activities start, a large number of trucks flock to the loading yard blocks containing a huge number of export containers, thus jamming the working lane. This paper considers the problem of determining the sequence of trucks entering the working lane that minimizes the total time required to serve all the empty trucks dispatching to a loading yard block. An algorithm with easy implementation is developed to find the optimal sequence easily.