This paper concerns the problem of operating a landside container
exchange area that is serviced by multiple semi-automated rail
mounted gantry cranes (RMGs) that are moving on a single
bi-directional traveling lane. Such a facility is built by Patrick
Corporation at the Port Botany terminal in Sydney. The gantry
cranes are a scarce resource and handle the bulk of container
movements. Thus, they require a sophisticated analysis to achieve
near optimal utilization. We present a three stage algorithm to
manage the container exchange facility, including the scheduling of
cranes, the control of associated short-term container stacking, and
the allocation of delivery locations for trucks and other container
transporters. The key components of our approach are a time scale
decomposition, whereby an integer program controls decisions across
a long time horizon to produce a balanced plan that is fed to a
series of short time scale online subproblems, and a highly
efficient space-time divisioning of short term storage areas.
A computational evaluation shows that our heuristic can find
effective solutions for the planning problem; on real-world data it
yields a solution at most~8% above a lower bound on optimal RMG
utilization.
