Performance assessment and improvement of yard crane rehandling strategies for improving port drayage operations

Seaport terminals recognise the need to change current practices in order to improve regional air quality while enhancing their terminals’ competitiveness. One area that terminals can do better at is to improve their yard crane operations and in turn reduce the trucks in-terminal delay. This study examines various container rehandling strategies by the yard cranes with the goal of improving the time it takes for a drayage truck to pick up an import container and hence reducing the time of engine idling and the stop-and-go lugging. Simulation results highlight the benefit of having truck arrival information, and they indicate that this study’s proposed rehandling methods, which take advantage of truck arrival information, perform well compared to other methods. Also, the proposed backfilling method appears to be quite effective in reducing truck wait time.