Project Title: Sustainable Container Yard Operations in Dry Ports: Artificial Intelligence-Supported Decision Support System

Project Leader: Dr. Lecturer Mustafa Egemen TANER
Faculty of Engineering
Department of Industrial Engineering

Research Institution: Brunel University of London, United Kingdom

Project Duration: 12 Months

With the increasing importance of container transport, sustainable and efficient port operations have become one of the fundamental challenges of today's global logistics networks. Balancing operational efficiency with environmental sustainability in container terminals remains a significant unsolved logistics problem in the literature. This research project aims to develop a carbon-aware, artificial intelligence (AI)-supported Decision Support System (DSS) by optimising container stacking operations in dry ports. The proposed system offers a hybrid architecture capable of generating both static and adaptive decisions by integrating rule-based heuristic methods, meta-heuristic optimisation, and reinforcement learning within a digital twin environment. This structure, which will be developed and tested using real operational data collected from a leading dry port in Turkey, will combine the systematic modelling power of operational research techniques with the adaptive decision-making capabilities of artificial intelligence to present a strategic approach aligned with environmental goals that will reduce carbon emissions.