Within the overall yard layout design problem, two main decisions
can be noticed, namely the relative positioning of blocks in
the yard and the required number of blocks. Wiese, Suhl, and Kliewer
(2009) presents a Mixed Integer Program (MIP) to find a layout
that minimizes the total rectilinear travel distance between the
quay area, storage blocks, and yard gate. A high-level simulation
was used to show that the MIP outperforms man-made layouts
slightly in terms of average quay crane moves per hour. Wiese,
Suhl, and Kliewer (2010) propose an IP for an optimal rectangular
Asian layout by minimizing the total truck traveling and gantry
crane reshuffling costs. The decision is to determine the number
and location of driving lanes assuming random storage and retrieval
requests, single-cycle handling, and uniform usage of the storage
area. For the rectangular storage yard case, the authors
conclude that the proposed heuristic is within 1.5% of the optimal
solution and finds the optimal solution in 38% of the realistic instances
tested. For non-rectangular storage yards the model is
H.J. Carlo et al. / European Journal of Operational Research 235 (2014) 412–430 417
adapted to a non-linear model and a variable neighborhood descent
heuristic is proposed.