Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to describe the design of the decision support system for container terminal ship planning and to introduce the implemented system. The ship planning in container terminals consists of three major decision processes -the working schedule of gantry cranes the discharging sequence of inbound containers the loading position and sequence of outbound containers. For making these decision the proposed system can provide two ship planning modes the interactive planning mode with user-friendly GUI and the automated planning made. To implement the automated planning routine we acquired the planning rules from the expert planner in container terminals and developed an expert system based on the rules. Finally we evaluated the system developed and the potential for commercialization by using container terminal data.
