Yard truck configurations for efficient operation of container terminals in Hong Kong

There is significant fluctuation of container terminal throughput, hence it is inefficient to keep a full complement of yard trucks for meeting the transportation requirements. Large numbers of yard trucks not only increase the cost, but can also lead to congestion in both the yard and quay sides. Container terminals in Hong Kong choose to outsource extra yard trucks when the transportation requirements are increasing, so that the terminals do not need to purchase additional yard trucks. However, such a yard truck employment strategy presents a new practical problem that terminals need to solve. This paper studies the influence of yard truck configurations on the truck employment strategy combined with the yard truck scheduling and the storage allocation problem. This problem is solved by a proposed two-level heuristic approach. The computational experimental results show the effect of different yard truck configurations on terminal operation efficiency.