Rubber tired gantry crane deployment for container yard operation

Container terminal's competitiveness is generally measured by the vessel discharging and loading time. The shore crane operation has attracted a number of research works. However, yard operation management has been very much experience based and did not receive much attention until last decade. This paper presents an algorithm and a mathematical model for the optimal yard crane deployment. The potential of the model in optimizing yard crane deployment was tested with a set of real operation data extracted from a major container yard terminal. (C) 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.