Transshipment yards, where gantry cranes allow for an e cient transshipment of containers between di erent freight trains, are important entities in modern railway systems and facilitate the general shift from point-to-point transport to hub-and-spoke railway systems. Modern rail-rail transshipment yards accelerate container handling, so that multiple smaller trains with equal destination can b...

Container transport, an integral part of intercontinental trade, has steadily increased over the past few decades. The productivity of such a system, in part, hinges on the efficient allocation of terminal resources such that the container transit time is minimized. This study provides an analytical framework, which entails efficient scheduling of quay and yard cranes, to minimize the time spen...

This paper summarizes the most important advances of the used crane control technology in perspective of automatic operation of container cranes. Faster and more productive container cranes demands highly efficient yard system. Storage capacity is the limitation for most terminals today; automatic operation offers optimum stacking density and peak capacity equivalent for continuous manning of e...

In this paper, a method integrating Q-learning algorithm and simulation technique is proposed to optimize the operation scheduling in container terminals. Firstly Q-learning algorithms for yard cranes and yard trailers are designed to obtain the optimal scheduling strategy of yard cranes and yard trailers. Then Q-learning is combined with simulation to develop an integrating scheduling model in...

In this paper we look at the longer term impact of double cycling on port operations including crane, vessel, and berth productivity. Double cycling is a technique by which empty crane moves are converted into productive ones. We use a double cycling sequence that is operationally convenient, easy to model, and nearly optimum. We compare the performance of this sequence to those determined by a...

In a normal port operation, yard cranes are used to move containers from one location to another for import, export or relocation purposes. In order to locate the positions of containers, a database is set up in the office server to store the current locations of existing containers within the yard. Whenever the Rubber Tyred Gantry (RTG) crane operator moves a container around, the database has...

The quay crane scheduling problem studied in this paper is to determine a handling sequence of holds for quay cranes assigned to a container vessel considering interference between quay cranes. This paper provides a mixed integer programming model for the considered quay crane scheduling problem that is NP-complete in nature. A genetic algorithm is proposed to obtain near optimal solutions. Com...

International sea-freight container transportation has grown dramatically over the last years and container terminals represent nowadays a key actor in the global shipping network. Terminal managers have to face with an increasing competitiveness among terminals, which require more and more efficiency in container operations both along the quayside and within the yard: the objective is usually ...

This paper considers the effectiveness of a truck appointment system in improving the yard efficiency of the container terminal. This research uses truck appointment information to improve the import container retrieval operation and reduce container rehandles by adopting an advanced container location assignment algorithm. By reducing the container rehandles, the terminal could improve yard cr...