must be reclaimed. The goal of the planning process is to maximize the throughput without causing unacceptable delays for the vessels.

For a given set of vessels arriving at the terminal, the goal is thus to assign each cargo of a vessel to a location in the stockyard, schedule the assembly of these cargoes, and schedule the reclaiming of these cargoes, so as to minimize the average delay of the vessels, where the delay of a vessel is defined to be the difference between the departure time of the vessel (or equivalently the time that the last cargo of the vessel has been reclaimed) and the earliest time the vessel could depart under ideal circumstances, i.e., the departure time if we assume the vessel arrives at its $ETA$ and its stockpiles are ready to be reclaimed immediately upon its arrival.

When assigning the cargoes of a vessel to locations in the stockyard, scheduling their assembly, and scheduling their reclaiming, the limited stockyard space, stacking rates, reclaiming rates, and reclaimer movements have to be accounted for.

Since reclaimers are most likely to be the constraining entities in the system, reclaimer activities need to be modeled at a fine level of detail. 