Yard template planning in transshipment hubs under uncertainty

This paper is concerned with yard management in transshipment hubs, where a consignment strategy is often used to reduce reshuffling and vessel turnaround time. This strategy groups unloaded containers according to their destination vessels. In this strategy, yard template determines the assignment of the spaces (subblocks) in the yard to the vessels. This paper studies how to make a robust yard template under uncertain environment, e.g., uncertain arrival time and berthing positions of the arriving vessels. To reduce the potential traffic congestion of prime movers, the workload distribution of subblocks within the yard is considered. A mixed integer programming model is formulated to minimize the expected value of the route length of container transshipping flows in the yard. Moreover, a heuristic algorithm is developed for solving the problem in large-scale realistic environments. Numerical experiments are conducted to prove the necessity of the proposed model and also validate the efficiency of the proposed algorithm.