Yard Operations and Management in Automated Container Terminals: A Review

With the increasing volume of global moving containers and the application of automation technologies, it is important for container terminals to improve handling efficiency. This paper provides a comprehensive literature review on yard management issues in automated container terminals, which is proven to be the key to improve container handling efficiency. This paper analyzes the hotspots in the current yard management research based on the VOSviewer for the last 20 years. More than 600 papers are recorded, and we further discuss 75 papers closely related to the research aiming to identify main features in current research. The research is divided into several clusters based on the 75 papers by VOSviewer. After reviewing and analyzing the literature on these clusters, this paper demonstrates the contribution and gap in the current research and puts forward emerging pressing research topics on yard management in automated container terminals for future research.