Yard storage planning for river terminals on one belt one road

In the blueprint of the one belt one road initiative, river ports are critical nodes for connecting seaports with inland plants. But operators encounter a yard storage planning problem for export containers with service restrictions on vessels due to different water depths along a river terminal. In order to facilitate container handling process, yard blocks are partitioned into different zones that each zone dedicates to a quay section. This yard allocation research aims at minimising the workload imbalance among yard blocks of different zones. A 'sub-block clustering' method is advocated to increase the flexibility of allocating yard storage space to containers and thus to improve the use of the yard space. The yard allocation problem is formulated as a mixed integer linear programming model. A property of this problem is used to propose an efficient solution approach. Numerical studies show that it obtained satisfactory solutions to most test instances.