ABSTRACT
Business School, Loughborough University, Leicestershire LE11 3TU, UK
Yat-wah Wan
National Dong Hwa University, Hualien, Taiwan
Chuqian Zhang
Information Technology, Columbia University, New York, USA
1 INTRODUCTION
Container terminals play a critical role in global transportation. Their effective operation ensures orderly flows of containers between ocean-going vessels and
landside transportation. Operation in a container terminal includes the gate house, the quayside, and the container storage yard processes and the latter two represent the majority of physical container handling activities. Figure 1 shows schematically the operations of a container terminal (Zhang et al., 2003).