A look at where the friction in modern yard planning actually comes from, and why it’s worth solving one use case at a time.
Ask anyone who plans a container yard for a living what the job is actually like, and you’ll rarely hear about one big problem. You’ll hear about a dozen small ones, all happening at once, all competing for attention.
A stack that’s gotten a little more mixed than it should be, and nobody notices until the rehandle count is already climbing. A container the system couldn’t slot cleanly, so a planner overrides it and moves on. A block quietly carrying more work than the others while trucks queue outside it. None of these are dramatic on their own. They show up weeks later, especially in the numbers.
Container volumes keep climbing, and the pace has picked up. World container port throughput reached 920 million TEU in 2024, up 6.9% year over year, a sharp jump from the 0.6% growth rates recorded in both 2022 and 2023. Zoom out further and the trend holds: port volumes have grown roughly 3% a year on average over the past decade, adding 248 million TEU, or 37%, in total since 2014.
World container port throughput hit 920 million TEU in 2024, up 6.9% year over year, versus just 0.6% growth in each of the two years before it. (UNCTAD Data Hub, 2025)
Global container handling capacity is projected to grow 4.8% in 2025, the largest annual increase since the 2008 financial crisis, and still behind the pace of recent throughput growth. (Drewry Global Container Terminal Operators Annual Review and Forecast, 2025/26)
Capacity is expanding to meet that demand, but not always fast enough to stay ahead of it. That gap is exactly where yard planning feels the pressure first: more volume moving through the same footprint, on schedules with less room to absorb a bad hour, let alone a bad day.
Most terminals have responded by adding more visibility -more dashboards, reports and systems tracking more things. That helps, to a point. But visibility alone can’t change a decision that was made an hour ago. Most yard tools are good at showing planners what happened; fewer help them understand what’s about to happen. That’s why, in YIS, visibility is not separate from the solution – it’s what helps planners see what’s happening now, what’s likely to happen next, and make better decisions in time.
Talk to enough planners and operations leads, and the same shapes keep showing up, even though the specific situations differ from terminal to terminal:
These aren’t three separate issues so much as one underlying pattern: yard operations are still largely built to describe the present, not to anticipate what’s coming next. And in an environment where conditions change hour to hour, and volumes keep climbing, that gap is where most of the avoidable cost hides.
Yard Intelligence Suite (YIS)
This is the problem we’re working on with Yard Intelligence Suite (YIS), our key solution under Advanced Optimization, alongside RTG-O and TT-O. YIS isn’t one feature aimed at one report. It’s a suite of tools, each one built around a specific decision a planner makes every day on yard decisions, catching rehandle risk before it happens, cutting planner overrides, and keeping work balanced across the yard so trucks don’t queue.
What this blog series will cover
Over the next three posts, we’ll walk through specific use cases one at a time: what the problem looks like on the ground, what YIS does differently, and what that’s worth in practice. We’ll start with one of the most direct and measurable benefits: surfacing problems earlier with augmented intelligence and helping teams respond sooner.
