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).