Abstract:Railway container terminals are regarded as the important nodes in hinterland transportation network. Transferring operation is main activity in operations management of container terminals. Scheduling the transferring activities optimally can be able to shorten the operating cycle among different transport vehicles, and improve the efficiency of cargo transportation in rail multimodal transportation. To make the operation plan of stacking yard rapidly, the transferring operation requires the container movement must be stacked intermediately via yard at present. In that scenario, two loading/discharging activities and one stacking activity must be occurred. For avoiding idly extra activities, synchronized transferring should be recommended. In this study, a mixed integer programming model with maximizing the number of synchronized transferring containers is proposed. Due to its intractability, a breakout local search algorithm is designed to solve this problem under study, especially for large-sized instances. The computational experiments are performed to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm.