Container storage and transshipment marine terminals

Abstract

This study addresses the storage arrangement of transshipment containers on a container yard, in order to carry Out efficiently the ship handling operations at a terminal where mega-containerships call. An optimization model is specified to investigate the now of containers from the mega-containership to feeder ships using intermediate storage at the yard. A heuristic based on the lagrangian relaxation is formulated. The quality of the heuristic approach is tested in a number of experiments. In the experiments, various Situations are analyzed with respect to mega-containership arrival rates, some strategies for stack arrangements and terminal layouts. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.