McLean's legacy: The current state of research on handling equipment in container transshipment yards
2026/03/18 by Felix Weidinger
Efficient container handling is essential for modern container terminals, where large volumes of containers are transferred between ships, trains, and trucks within transshipment yards. Therefore, the coordination of handling equipment such as cranes, yard trucks, and automated vehicles plays a crucial role in terminal performance.
In the chair’s latest research paper, Setareh Behzadi and Felix Weidinger, in collaboration with Julia Wenzel and Ralf Elbert from the Chair of Management and Logistics, present a comprehensive literature review on handling equipment in container transshipment yards. The study categorizes existing research by transshipment yard type and provides a structured overview of decision problems, solution approaches, and equipment technologies addressed in the literature.
Key contributions of the paper include:
- A classification of container transshipment yards based on their transport interfaces (e.g., rail-rail, rail-road, berth-rail, berth-road, berth-berth), enabling a structured comparison of existing studies.
- An overview of handling equipment technologies and related planning problems, highlighting research trends and gaps.
The results indicate that most studies focus on operational planning problems such as crane scheduling and equipment coordination, while comparatively little research addresses environmental aspects. The review highlights promising directions for future research, including resilience-oriented planning under uncertainty, integrated scheduling of multiple equipment types, stronger consideration of environmental objectives, and the increasing role of digital technologies such as AI-based scheduling and digital twins.
The article is available as open access in Transportation Research Part E: Logistics and Transportation Review:
Behzadi, S., Wenzel, J., Weidinger, F., Elbert, R.
McLean’s legacy: The current state of research on handling equipment in container transshipment yards.
Transportation Research Part E: Logistics and Transportation Review (2026).
