Simulation and Optimization of Container Yard Operations: A survey

Management of container terminal operations is essentially the allocation and scheduling of the expensive resources such as berths, quay cranes, storage space, yard cranes, and container carriers. Each of these resources plays an indispensable role in the interlocking processes in a container terminal. In this survey we give a critical review and a comparative study on various decision problems that arise at container terminals and in most cases, the solutions to which go into making up the overall terminal management system. For each problem, an overview of literature is presented, along with a description of the quantitative models that try to solve the problem. We focus our attention on yard management, since the operation on storage yard is the most complicated part at the terminal where both inbound and outbound container flows are handled in this area simultaneously.