Same here, I'm in the business of terminals as well as hinterland transportation companies. There is no shortage of people trying to solve the 'sexy' academic problems like stowage plan optimization, berth assignment problems, crane splits, etc, but only very little gets implemented in practice. It is a tough business, with an even tougher political landscape, since dock workers traditionally have very strong unions.

All of the problems you can neatly divide and name are interrelated in practice, and trying to have algorithms "magically" figure it out for users is pretty much guaranteed to fail. This business eats software hotshots who think they can swoop in and "just" run some algos, "because it's just a TSP / Constraint Solver / [insert your approach here] right?". This business can definitely use bright minds, but start humbly, and start by talking to real world users please.

You don't appear to have any contact details on your profile, but if you ever would like to exchange thoughts with another company in this business, shoot me an e-mail. I think we're doing some interesting stuff for the <1 million TEU/year segment of terminals, especially if they're heavy into multi modal.