The Landside Bottleneck of Automated Container Yard Operations

After introducing actual 10,000+ TEU class vessels, terminal operations at seaports now got again bottlenecks in the container shipping industry. In order to accelerate quayside throughput and increase on-site storage capacity at container yards, improved quay crane technology, new technologies for horizontal yard movement and automated stacking areas are increasingly installed i.e. at seaports of Hamburg and Rotterdam. But on the landside, processes with land-based transport carriers are still the same as before: pickup and delivery by trucks must be managed as well as transfer operations from/to railway stations somewhere else which are executed by straddle carriers or by truck/chassis systems. These approaches pose in practice many problems as the terminal operators have to manage transportation processes with both internal equipment from/to railway stations and external equipment of drayage services. Reviewing actual terminal operation practice at HHLA's Container Terminal Altenwerder (CTA) and HHLA's Container Terminal Burchardkai (CTB) at Hamburg, problems of transfer from automated RMG systems to landside carriers are assessed and viable solutions are proposed with a special focus laid on the objectives of traffic control, traffic safety, turnover capacity and terminal security. A two-level transfer operation is proposed as an option to solve landside transfer problems at container yards employing automated RMG systems. There, internal and external traffic are spatially separated on two different decks with the first on a ground floor and the later on the first floor. This solution of two-level transfer operations provides a separation of internal and external transportation processes.