An optimization model for storage yard management in transshipment hubs

This paper studies a yard storage allocation problem in a transshipment hub where there is a great number of loading and unloading activities. The primary challenge is to efficiently shift containers between the vessels and the storage area so that reshuffling and traffic congestion is minimized. In particular, to reduce reshuffling, a consignment strategy is used. This strategy groups unloaded containers according to their destination vessel. To reduce traffic congestion, a new workload balancing protocol is proposed. A mixed integer-programming model is then formulated to determine the minimum number of yard cranes to deploy and the location where unloaded containers should be stored. The model is solved using CPLEX. Due to the size and complexity of this model two heuristics are also developed. The first is a sequential method while the second is a column generation method. A bound is developed that allows the quality of the solution to be judged. Lastly, a numerical investigation is provided and demonstrates that the algorithms perform adequately on most cases considered.     

Flexible space-sharing strategy for storage yard management in a transshipment hub port

In this paper, a storage yard planning problem is studied for a transshipment port with limited space and high-throughput level. Generally, the consignment strategy is used in the yard for a transshipment port, where containers to the same destination vessel are stored together. This is to facilitate faster loading process as it reduces reshuffles as well as long distance movements of yard cranes. However, the consignment strategy is known to be inefficient in space utilization since each storage location must be dedicated to a particular vessel. To improve the space utilization while retaining the advantage of consignment, a new approach named the “flexible space-sharing strategy” is proposed. The idea is that the container space can be shared by two different vessels as long as their containers do not occupy the space at the same time. This strategy allows the same storage location to be reserved for two vessels. The amount of space will only be allocated to a specific vessel on the arrival of corresponding containers. By controlling where to stack the containers in the storage locations, the containers to each vessel are not mixed and the consignment feature can be preserved. This strategy is first formulated as a mixed integer program (MIP). As the MIP model has a block diagonal structure, we develop a search algorithm which combines MIP and heuristics to find the solution. The numerical experiments show that the “flexible space-sharing strategy” can handle much more containers within the same storage space compared with the “non-sharing strategy”.     

Modelling a resilient yard template under storage demand fluctuations in a container terminal

This article investigates the generation of a resilient yard template, which has the property of resilience under storage demand fluctuations. A stochastic programming model is formulated aiming at minimizing the risk of containers without available storage slots being assigned in the designated area. Furthermore, a corresponding particle swarm optimization algorithm is proposed for solving the model. Finally, numerical experiments are conducted to verify the effectiveness of the proposed model and solution approaches.