Many container terminals in the world adopt the consolidated yard planning strategy, where containers to be loaded into the same vessel are stacked in groups. This has been a good strategy because when a vessel is loading, yard cranes will be stationed at these locations, and the trucks shuttle between the quay cranes and the yard cranes almost in a conveyor belt fashion. These locations are op…
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 p…