Yard crane deployment in container terminals

A three-level, hierarchical system for yard crane (YC) management in container terminals and the algorithms for the bottom two levels were proposed in previous studies. The bottom two levels are responsible for YC job sequencing and intra-row YC deployment. This paper presents YC deployment strategies for inter-row YC deployment. The objectives are to minimize vehicle waiting times and the number of overflow jobs. We show by realistic simulation experiments that (1) when the number of yard cranes is less than the number of yard blocks, deploying YCs in proportion to the number of jobs in each row (3L-Pro-Jobs) is the best; (2) when the number of yard cranes is equal to or more than the number of yard blocks, the apparent workload approach, 3L-AW, performs best.