Tactical berth and yard template design at container transshipment terminals: A column generation based approach

• The quay-side berthing congestion issue in container terminals is studied.
• A proactive management strategy that balances the quay-side workload is proposed.
• A set covering formulation is developed for the berth and yard template design problem.
• Column generation based heuristic methods are developed and assessed by computational experiments.

Quay-side berthing congestion is an emerging challenging issue that arises in busy container transshipment terminals and calls for effective management of terminal operations. This paper tackles the berthing congestion problem by introducing a proactive management strategy from the terminal’s perspective that adjusts the calling schedule of feeder vessels in such a way that the quay-side workload distribution in the temporal dimension can be balanced. Such a schedule template design problem is considered simultaneously with another two tactical level decision problems, berth template design (i.e., determining preferred berthing positions for vessels) and yard template design (i.e., allocating storage yard space to transshipment flows). This highly integrated problem is formulated as a set covering model. Heuristic methods based on column generation are developed to obtain near-optimal solutions in an efficient way. Computational experiments on real-world sized test instances demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed approach.