Planning Container Terminal Layouts Considering Equipment Types and Storage Block Design

Currently, several container terminals are being expanded, redesigned or newly built. In all those cases the layout of the container terminal has to be designed. We discuss different technologies which can be used for container terminal operation and describe their impact on the terminal layout. Different container terminal layout categories are defined. For a layout which is typical for the use of automated rail-mounted gantry cranes we propose a procedure to calculate promising storage yard configurations. The results show that smaller block widths lead to higher yard performances, but also to higher cost. Using the proposed block design problem, we are able to calculate all non-dominated solutions, which enables terminal planners to choose a solution for their specific situation. Moreover, we analyze the impact of the reefer racks distribution on the yard performance. The results show that an equal distribution of reefer racks over the existing storage blocks allows the best workload distribution.