Flexible space-sharing strategy for storage yard management in a transshipment hub port

In this paper, a storage yard planning problem is studied for a transshipment port with limited space and high-throughput level. Generally, the consignment strategy is used in the yard for a transshipment port, where containers to the same destination vessel are stored together. This is to facilitate faster loading process as it reduces reshuffles as well as long distance movements of yard cranes. However, the consignment strategy is known to be inefficient in space utilization since each storage location must be dedicated to a particular vessel. To improve the space utilization while retaining the advantage of consignment, a new approach named the flexible space-sharing strategy is proposed. The idea is that the container space can be shared by two different vessels as long as their containers do not occupy the space at the same time. This strategy allows the same storage location to be reserved for two vessels. The amount of space will only be allocated to a specific vessel on the arrival of corresponding containers. By controlling where to stack the containers in the storage locations, the containers to each vessel are not mixed and the consignment feature can be preserved. This strategy is first formulated as a mixed integer program (MIP). As the MIP model has a block diagonal structure, we develop a search algorithm which combines MIP and heuristics to find the solution. The numerical experiments show that the flexible space-sharing strategy can handle much more containers within the same storage space compared with the non-sharing strategy.