TY - GEN A1 - Froyland, Gary A1 - Koch, Thorsten A1 - Megow, Nicole A1 - Duane, Emily A1 - Wren, Howard T1 - Optimizing the Landside Operation of a Container Terminal N2 - This paper concerns the problem of operating a landside container exchange area that is serviced by multiple semi-automated rail mounted gantry cranes (RMGs) that are moving on a single bi-directional traveling lane. Such a facility is being built by Patrick Corporation at the Port Botany terminal in Sydney. The gantry cranes are a scarce resource and handle the bulk of container movements. Thus, they require a sophisticated analysis to achieve near optimal utilization. We present a three stage algorithm to manage the container exchange facility, including the scheduling of cranes, the control of associated short-term container stacking, and the allocation of delivery locations for trucks and other container transporters. The key components of our approach are a time scale decomposition, whereby an integer program controls decisions across a long time horizon to produce a balanced plan that is fed to a series of short time scale online subproblems, and a highly efficient space-time divisioning of short term storage areas. A computational evaluation shows that our heuristic can find effective solutions for the planning problem; on real-world data it yields a solution at most~8\% above a lower bound on optimal RMG utilization. T3 - ZIB-Report - 06-06 KW - Integer Programming KW - Container Terminal KW - Intermediate Storage Area KW - Landside operation KW - Yard crane scheduling KW - Storage space allocation Y1 - 2006 UR - https://opus4.kobv.de/opus4-zib/frontdoor/index/index/docId/900 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:0297-zib-9004 ER -