Yard trailer routing at a maritime container terminal

This paper addresses the trailer routing problem at a maritime container terminal, where yard trailers are normally assigned to specific quay cranes until the work is finished. A more efficient trailer assignment method called “dynamic routing” is proposed. A heuristic was developed and a wide variety of computational experiments were conducted. The results of the experiments demonstrated that the dynamic routing reduces travel distance and generates substantial savings in the trailer fleet size and overall cost (15% reduction). The paper's contribution to the literature is the development of a new routing scheme achieving container handling cost savings for a terminal.