An optimisation framework for yard planning in a container terminal: case with automated rail-mounted gantry cranes

Different terminals, with their unique combinations of liner services, yard layouts and equipment configurations, may find that different yard planning strategies work better for their scenarios. While an optimum yard plan can be found for each yard planning strategy, it is interesting to know which strategy gives the best plan. In designing an IT-based search engine to discover the best yard planning strategy and/or scenario, having a generic specification and solver is important, so that the whole solution space could be represented and searched. We design a generic problem specification with parameterised scenarios and yard planning strategies, and formulate a generic mathematical model that solves for the optimum weekly yard plan template for that given problem. A good run time of this generic model is extremely important as the model will be executed hundreds of times in the search engine. Experiments are conducted with the model. An interesting discovery is that re-modelling a set of integer variables into multiple binary variables improve the run time tremendously, and in some cases, outperform the relaxed original model. We also find that the strategy which allows sharing of yard space between services yield better utilization for yard space and rail mounted gantry handling capacity.