An online storage strategy with dynamic bay reservations for container terminals

Deciding where to store containers has a high impact on the performance of a container terminal. The problem includes incomplete planning information. We propose a two-stage strategy which decides online where to store import, export, and transshipment containers. On the first stage, a block is chosen based on the workload of the gantry cranes at the blocks as well as either a transport distance or a storage capacity measure. On the second stage, bay and slot are determined. Bays are reserved dynamically so that containers with the same destination vessel are aggregated in related bays. We follow the well-known segregation strategy, but in a successive dynamic fashion to deal with incomplete planning data. Six variants of the strategies are compared to each other by means of a study based on a commercial discrete-event terminal simulation software. Computational results suggest that the workload-based component of the storage strategy is sensitive to parameter tuning. However, the bay reservation strategy is in particular effective for terminals with many transshipment containers as it is able to reduce the number of inefficient container reshuffle moves by up to sixty percent.