An inference pool for an intermodal yard

An intermodal yard is a container terminal with the water taken out and a railroad put in. Trains arrive on a schedule the yard does not set. Boxes come off the wells and go to the ground, to a trailer frame, or to a stack. Trucks arrive at a gate, pick up, and leave. The site is long, flat, and open, with lift equipment moving along the tracks and yard trucks shuttling between them and the gate.

The machines are the familiar ones, automated and semi-automated: reach stackers and lift cranes along the track, yard trucks on the lanes, cameras at the gate and along the inspection paths. Each has a vendor and an on-board model, and each is now asking for perception and decisions it cannot carry. The pool is for them, and on an intermodal yard the pool sits in the yard office, in the yard's own rack, serving everything outdoors over the yard network.

A long site and its network

The first practical fact about an intermodal yard is its shape. It is as long as a train, and the equipment that needs inference is spread along that whole length. The pool itself is compact: Czar nodes in a conditioned room in the yard's own building, joined as a Czar Grid. What has to reach the far tracks is the network.

Element 31 engineers install the pool with the operator's automation team and the equipment vendors, and part of that work is making sure the facility network carries inference to where the machines actually are. The pool serves within each machine's latency budget, and a machine at the end of the yard is held to the same budget as one by the gate. When the network to a far lane is interrupted, the machine there falls back to its own model or stops, exactly as its vendor built it to.

Perception along the track

Working a train is a sequence of reads and decisions. Which box is in which well, is it the one the yard system expects, is the interbox connector clear, is the trailer frame the right kind for this box, is there a person on the walkway. Lift equipment operators do this by eye today, and automated lifts do it with on-board models for the easy cases.

The pool takes the hard cases: a box number half under grime, a well partly in shadow, a lashing that may or may not be released. It serves the read and the decision to the lift over the yard network. The lift's own motion limits, its stops, and its interlocks stay on the lift. The Grid serves perception; it does not drive the spreader.

Grounding, stacking, and the hostler run

Once a box is off the train, the yard has to decide where it goes and how it gets there. Grounded for a truck to collect today, stacked for later, or set on a trailer frame for a hostler to move. Those are decisions with constraints the yard system knows: the pickup appointment, the box's weight, the stack rules. The pool reads the constraints over a declared route and serves routing and placement decisions to the yard trucks and lifts from any vendor.

A yard truck on a long run to the gate needs continuous decisions about its path: a blocked lane, a truck backing out of a slot, a pedestrian who should not be there. The pool serves those decisions inside the truck's budget. The truck's own stop behavior is the truck's own, and it does not wait on the pool to engage.

The gate and the record

The gate at an intermodal yard reads the same things a terminal gate reads: box numbers, seals, placards, plates, paperwork. The pool handles the reads lane-side models cannot, and the record of every read stays on the yard's hardware. Images of customers' cargo do not leave the yard to be understood.

Every decision the pool serves is on the record. Site tasks for lifts and yard trucks are authored in Agency Studio, bounded by zone, speed, and distance from the tracks, approved by named roles, and replayable afterward. When a box is set in the wrong stack, there is a record to read.

Posture and the subscription

Most yards run connected to the yard system and the vendors' fleet software over declared routes through Local Bridge, with egress denied by default. Footage, captures, and adapted weights stay on the operator's hardware. A yard with a reason to can run air-gapped, with updates carried in as signed bundles. The appliance is the same; the posture is the yard's decision.

The commercial form is one subscription for the configured Grid, which does not move when the yard adds trucks. For the port and terminal picture more broadly, see Solutions for ports. For how a yard improves its own models over its own seasons, see A yard that learns from its own footage.