Joint optimization of space allocation and yard crane deployment in container terminal under uncertain demand

The fluctuation of container transportation volume caused by trade policy, epidemic disease and other factors has a significant impact on the terminal yard management. Especially, the decision of yard space problem and yard crane deployment problem is depending on the arriving container volume. Due to the limited space and mechanical resources of the terminal yard, the uncertain container demand will lead to the waste or shortage of yard resources. In order to improve the efficiency of yard management, this paper studies the integrated optimization of yard resources considering the impact of uncertain container demand, and a stochastic optimization model is established to improve the robustness of the daily yard management. Due to the complexity of the model, a harmony search algorithm based on two-stage decomposition strategy is designed to solve the proposed model. To accelerate the solving speed, a scoring method is developed to generate the initial space allocation plan, and a Tabu list is added to improve the solution quality. The numerical experiments are conducted to validate effectiveness and efficiency of the method.