Title: Performance assessment and improvement of yard crane rehandling strategies for improving port drayage operations

Authors: Nathan Huynh; Jose M. Vidal; Narges Kaveshgar; Omor Sharif

Addresses: Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of South Carolina, 300 Main St. Columbia, SC 29208, USA. ' Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Swearingen Engineering Center, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC 29208, USA. ' Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of South Carolina, 300 Main St. Columbia, SC 29208, USA. ' Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of South Carolina, 300 Main St. Columbia, SC 29208, USA

Abstract: Seaport terminals recognise the need to change current practices in order to improve regional air quality while enhancing their terminals' competitiveness. One area that terminals can do better at is to improve their yard crane operations and in turn reduce the trucks in-terminal delay. This study examines various container rehandling strategies by the yard cranes with the goal of improving the time it takes for a drayage truck to pick up an import container and hence reducing the time of engine idling and the stop-and-go lugging. Simulation results highlight the benefit of having truck arrival information, and they indicate that this study's proposed rehandling methods, which take advantage of truck arrival information, perform well compared to other methods. Also, the proposed backfilling method appears to be quite effective in reducing truck wait time.

Keywords: seaport container terminals; simulation; yard crane services; service strategies; service improvement; terminal efficiency; port drayage efficiency; environmental stewardship; container rehandling; performance evaluation; in-terminal delays; yard cranes; simulation; truck arrival information; truck wait times.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSSCA.2012.045262

International Journal of Six Sigma and Competitive Advantage, 2012 Vol.7 No.1, pp.41 - 61

Published online: 22 Apr 2015 *

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