Research on allocation for block workload of container yard under multi-ship delivery

With ever increasing containerization in global supply chain, the competition among container terminals has become critical. Functioned as a place to store import/export containers, planning and scheduling of container yard is an important problem of container terminals. In this paper, in order to solve the yard allocation problem, which is an important element of container yard planning, an optimization model of import/export containers´ workload allocation for yard blocks is proposed. First, a heuristic algorithm based on balancing dynamically the workload of terminal equipment is developed to generate the initial solution. Then a tabu search algorithm is used to further search the better solution. The experimental results show that the proposed model and its algorithm is a promising tool for allocating yard blocks´ workload.