Research On Optimizing Management Of Container Terminal Yard

Container traffic has been growing rapidly since its beginning in the 1961. These developments have increased the importance of logistics and transportation, and in particular the importance of marine transportation systems. After joined in WTO, imports and exports use containers as main method. And the type of container ship becomes more and more large, the speed becomes more faster, the amount of containers that these terminals needs to operate increases rapidly. This requests nicer terminal managements. But, in fact, terminal managers always neglect this aspect. The process of ship coming, handling, stacking make up of the system of container flow. The rate of any process of this system is down, which may bring the whole system rate to down. At last, this will bring the operating cost of the whole terminal to high and resources are waste. To cope with increased traffic demands and with decreasing profit margins the terminal operator need to improve the resource allocation, to reduce operation costs, thereby to increase the efficiency of terminal operations.Because storage space and yard cranes are two scarce resources used in container storage yard. The efficient allocation of these two resources translates directly to the efficient yard operations. In this research, firstly, a cost model is developed for the decision making. The cost model consists of the space cost, the investment cost of transfer cranes, and the operating cost of transfer cranes and trucks. The model also analysis the factors that can influence terminal operation, and this can offer advice to the managers for their decisions.Secondly, a optimizing the container transfer schedule model (SAM) is developed, with an objective function designed to minimize the turn around time of container ships. But optimizing the container transfer schedule at the multimodal terminal is known to be NP-hard, which implies that the best solution becomes computationally infeasible as problem sizes increase. Genetic Algorithm (GA) techniques are used to reduce container handling/transfer times and ships' time at the port by speeding up handling operations. The GA is chosen due to the relatively good results that have been reported even withthe simplest GA implementations to obtain near-optimal solutions in reasonable time. The SAM model can make the rate of shore cranes and transfer cranes matching. And then the whole container flow may expedite.Finally, a case is given to show the application of the theory and methods into the facts. The thesis analyzes the optimal transfer carne allocation and handling resource allocation, and container transfer schedule of the fact cases. Some conclusions and suggestions are also proposed for the resource allocation of its operations.In this thesis, we can know that with existence resource level, through optimal container terminal yard and increase the rate of yard operations, can avoid the bottle-neck of container port inner container flow. It can reach the both-win to port and shipper.