Synchronization of yard truck scheduling and storage allocation in container terminals

Yard truck scheduling and storage allocation, as two separate subproblems in port operations, have been extensively studied in the past decades. However, from the operational point of view, they are highly interdependent. This article proposes an integer programming model in which yard truck scheduling and storage allocation problems are formulated as a whole for heterogeneous import containers. Different stacking times at yard blocks is modelled as well. The objective of the proposed model is to reduce the congestion and waiting time of yard trucks in the terminal so as to decrease the makespan of discharging containers. Owing to the inherent computational complexity, a genetic algorithm and a greedy heuristic algorithm have been designed. Computational experiments show that the proposed genetic algorithm and greedy algorithm are both effective in solving the studied problem.