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Yard Management

The Yard module is the depot's physical map — every zone, bay, row, and tier, and which containers currently sit in which slot. It's where you place containers on gate-in, move them while they're in the depot, block/unblock capacity, and pre-reserve slots ahead of an expected arrival.

Before you start

  • Yard configuration must already exist — at least one zone with its bay/row/tier grid defined. With zero configured zones, the Yard page shows: "No yard zones configured. Go to Settings → Yard Configuration to set up zones and bays." and there is nothing for the slot picker or auto-assign to choose from.
  • To pre-allocate a slot for a specific container, that container should ideally already be a known number — though the allocation drawer can auto-register an unregistered one on the fly (see below), which also requires a Shipping Line to exist.

Walkthrough

Yard View (the "Yard View" tab)

  1. Open Yard from the Operations section of the sidebar. The page opens on the Yard View tab by default; Slot Allocations is the second tab.
  2. A utilisation bar across the top shows one card per zone: code, occupancy percentage (color coded green/amber/red), and occupied/free/blocked counts. Click a card to filter the grid to that zone; click it again to return to All Zones.
  3. Use Search container, ISO size... to highlight matching cells across zones (matching zones float to the top and ring blue); the All Zones dropdown filters to one zone directly.
  4. The legend explains cell coloring: Empty, Occupied, Blocked, Pre-allocated (dashed amber — a slot with a pending allocation but no container yet).
  5. Each zone renders as a bay/row/tier grid with tier tabs (T1, T2, …) and a Stack Map toggle that collapses all tiers into one view showing stack height badges (e.g. "×3").
  6. Click any occupied or empty cell to open a small popover:
    • Occupied → Move Container button, opening a dialog with a required destination slot (via the same zone→row→slot picker used elsewhere) and an optional Reason field.
    • Empty, no pending allocation → Allocate slot button, opening the New Yard Slot Allocation drawer pre-filled to that exact slot.
    • Empty, with a pending allocation → Cancel allocation button.
  7. A 3D: On/Off toggle (bottom right) renders the selected zone as an interactive 3D view instead of the flat grid — it requires a single zone to be selected first.

  8. The manual refresh icon next to "Live container positions" re-fetches the grid and utilisation data on demand.

    Correction vs. Move

    Assigning a slot to a container that's already in the depot with no slot (e.g. migrated from a legacy system) is a distinct "correction" flow, reached from the Gate Pass detail page's Assign Slot button (see Gate) — not from here. Move, by contrast, requires the container to already occupy a slot and always records a yard-move history entry.

Yard Slot Allocations (the "Slot Allocations" tab)

Pre-reserving a slot ahead of a container's actual arrival, so that when it's gated in, the system places it automatically instead of prompting the gate operator to choose.

  1. Click New Allocation to open the New Yard Slot Allocation drawer.
  2. Container Number (optional) — same validation/lookup pattern as the Gate-In form. If the number isn't in the registry yet, an amber panel appears requiring ISO Size / Type and Shipping Line to auto-register it on save.
  3. If no container number is given, you must instead pick an ISO Size / Type directly — the drawer explains: "Required when allocating without a specific container" (a zone-level, not container-specific, reservation).
  4. Zone * — select which zone to reserve in.
  5. Specific Slot (optional — leave blank for auto-assign) — a cascading Row then Slot picker; leaving either blank means "auto-assign within zone" or "auto-assign within row."
  6. Notes and Expires At (optional) — an allocation that expires unused is released automatically.
  7. Click Create Allocation.
  8. The Slot Allocations list filters by status — All / Pending / Assigned / Cancelled — and shows Container, ISO Type, Zone, Slot, Status, Expires, and Notes. A pending row offers Reassign (pick a different row/slot) and Cancel.

How this connects to Gate-In

At Gate-In finalisation, if a pending allocation exists for the container being gated in, the Finalise dialog shows it directly ("Pre-allocation found") and uses it — skipping the manual slot-picker step entirely.

Auto-assign logic

When no specific slot is chosen (at allocation time, at gate-in finalise, or anywhere else auto-assign applies), the system chooses a slot using this priority:

  1. Container-type → zone-type matching — a Reefer container is preferred into a Reefer zone, a Dangerous-Goods (DG) container into a DG zone, and a general container into a General zone.
  2. Ground level first — tier 1 (ground) slots are preferred over stacking a container on top of another.
  3. Same-shipping-line grouping — among otherwise-equal candidates, a slot is preferred where neighboring containers already belong to the same shipping line, keeping a carrier's fleet physically grouped in the yard.

If no zone/slot satisfies the depot's configured stacking rules, auto-assign fails with an error rather than placing the container somewhere invalid — meaning Yard configuration has to actually match the fleet you're operating (e.g. a depot with reefer containers but no configured reefer zone will hit this).

Who can access this

  • Admin, Manager: full read/write.
  • Gate Operator: read/write — part of core gate duties.
  • Yard Operator: read/write — this is their primary screen.
  • Viewer: read-only.
  • Billing: no yard access.