Yard crane deployment in container terminals

Abstract

In recent years, the shipping trades in Singapore increases tremendously and the resources of the container terminals have limited resources. To stay competitive, terminals have to utilize their resources efficiently. This project aims to help terminals to reduce the trucks waiting time in the storage yard by using a simulation approach and the improved least cost heuristic algorithm to deploy yard cranes to high workload block. This report will discuss the design and the result of the experiments using the original least cost heuristic algorithm and its improvements. From this project, it was found that the improvement using weighted scheme do improve the waiting time of the trucks and had the least vertical yard crane gantries.