AS/RS based yard and yard planning

In this paper,we apply the split-platform automated storage/retrieval systems (SP-AS/RSs) (Hu et al.,2005) to store containers in the yard to improve the yard performance and to increase the utilization of the yard space.The layout of an SP-AS/RS based yard is described in detail.To achieve an efficient operation,we present a novel yard space allocation policy called the 'second-carrier-based allocation policy',which can help to alleviate the out-of-sequence problem of containers and the congestion of vehicles at the AS/RS racks.Different allocation policies are compared by an integrated container terminal simulation system.The simulation results show that the second-carrier-based policy is very efficient and has the potential to offer high terminal performance.