Modeling and Solution for Yard Truck Dispatch Planning at Container Terminal

Abstract

This research addresses the dispatch planning of yard trucks to support transferring tasks of containers between shipside and yard areas. With considering the fundamental operations of fixed number of trucks serving one quay crane, we discuss the possible serving status of yard trucks in the connection of task by task. Upon these limited connection patterns, we formulate a min-max nonlinear integer programming model for dispatching yard trucks to efficiently complete the system works. A heuristic approach with two phases of selecting locations for stored or picked containers then assigning served trucks is suggested. We apply it with four proposed principles of location assignment on the analysis of the real-world cases from a dedicated terminal. The results show that the closest position assignment principle is better in the larger scale problems. However, more trucks than the critical number can not increase the performance.