Joint planning of berth and yard allocation in transshipment terminals using multi-cluster stacking strategy

•We study the joint berth and yard allocation planning in transshipment hubs.•Multi-cluster stacking strategy is proposed to deal with the yard congestion.•A three-stage heuristic solution approach is developed to find efficient solutions.•The overall terminal productivity is improved by using multi-cluster strategy.

In this work, a joint planning problem for berth and yard allocation in transshipment terminals is addressed. Multi-cluster stacking strategy is proposed to split each transshipment flow into a number of container clusters and then stack each cluster in different yard blocks. A mixed integer quadratic programming model is formulated to minimize the total distance of exchanging containers between mother vessels and feeders, and the workload imbalance among yard blocks. A novel three-stage heuristic solution approach is developed and extensive numerical experiments are conducted to show the effectiveness of the proposed approach and the benefit of the multi-cluster strategy.