An Optimal Strategy for Yard Trucks Management in Hong Kong Container Terminals

Since the premium prices of yard trucks and significantly daily volatility of containers serving demand, it is an uneconomic method to keep a full team of fleet to cover the entire service. Some of the transportation services are outsourced to other external companies. The strategy of outsourcing yard trucks is a decision making problem that container terminals are currently facing. Yard truck scheduling and storage allocation are two major operations that related to yard trucks management problem. In this paper, the studied yard trucks management problem is focused on integration of the yard truck scheduling and the storage allocation problems. The objective is to minimize the total operation cost of in-house trucks, out-sourced trucks, and delay of requests. As the proposed problem is an NP-hard problem, a hybrid heuristic approach with genetic algorithm and linear programming is proposed to solve the problem. The effectiveness of the proposed method is analyzed from using practical data obtained from Hong Kong terminals.