The continuous growth of global maritime trade and dynamic operational characteristics of river-sea intermodal container terminals create an urgent need to enhance transshipment efficiency. Block assignment and yard crane (YC) redeployment (BA-YCR) are two tightly coupled scheduling processes that significantly impact overall yard operational efficiency. In response to minute-level workload fluctuations, effectively optimizing the BA-YCR problem in real time remains challenging. To this end, this study proposes a multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL)-based approach for real-time optimization of the BA-YCR problem. The BA-YCR is formulated as a Markov Decision Process model, with the objective of minimizing YC redeployments, operational delays, and transport time. A hybrid reward mechanism is designed to balance exploration and coordination between agents. A two-stage multi-agent decision framework is developed, in which the coupling scheduling policies are trained using the Proximal Policy Optimization algorithm. Numerical experiments demonstrate that, the proposed MARL-based approach consistently outperforms benchmark methods. The well-trained scheduling policies achieve improvements of 0.2% to 81.3% in solution quality, while maintaining a computation time of less than 5 seconds, even in large-scale scenarios. Furthermore, sensitivity analyses based on a real-world container terminal further validate the practical applicability and generalization of the proposed approach. The results not only support terminal operators in developing reliable real-time BA-YCR strategies, but also offer practical insights for real-time scheduling optimization using MARL-based method in broader engineering applications.
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