Determining Crane Areas inIntermodal Transshipment Yards:The Yard Partition Problem

At rail-road transshipment yards, gantry cranes move containers from freighttrains to trucks and vice versa. They constitute important entities in today'sintermodal transportation systems. Real-world yards are often partitionedinto several disjunct crane areas, so that crane interferences during containertransshipment are avoided. In practice, the lengths of such crane areas aretypically determined by simple rules of thumb, i.e., each crane receives anequally sized area, which might result in an unleveled division of labor amongcranes and, thus, prolong train processing times. This paper provides an exactsolution procedure which determines disjunct yard areas of varying sizefor multiple gantry cranes in polynomial runtime, so that the workload fora given pulse of trains is equally distributed among cranes. Furthermore,we investigate the potential acceleration of train processing as compared toequally sized areas in a yard simulation....