Simultaneous berth allocation and yard planning at tactical level

We present a simultaneous berth allocation and yard planning problem at tactical level, since the berth allocation has a great impact on the yard planning and vice versa. This problem is solved by means of an alternating berth and yard planning heuristic approach. The alternating heuristic quickly converges to a local minimum which heavily depends on the starting point. Therefore, we formulate another optimization problem for generating a suitable starting point. A real size case study provided by PSA Antwerp shows that our approach to simultaneously solve both problems might reduce the total straddle carrier travel distance considerably as compared with a representative allocation.