Yard Planning Considering the Load Profile of Resources in Container Terminals

The main activities of container terminals are to load container freights to vessels, discharge them from vessels, and store them in the storage yard. Container terminals make many operational plans to execute these functions effectively. If the plans do not consider enough the loads of related resources, they may have low actualities. This study discusses the optimal yard planning model which considers various resources, such as the storage yard, yard cranes, internal vehicles, and travel lanes, in container terminals. The model determines the groups and amounts of containers which are stored in each storage block by using the resource profile. The yard planning problem is represented to the multi–commodity minimal cost flow problem and is formulated to the linear programming model. In order to explain the application of the mathematical model, the numerical examples are presented. Additionally, the relationship between the average load ratio and the relocation ratio is discussed.