Stockyard planning and optimization in ports is an important logistic task. It describes the calculation of efficient task sequences for unloading of bulk cargo from import vessels, the transportation, the storage and blending of material and for loading export ships. At this, the optimization goal is to minimize the laytimes of the import and export ships by optimized material operation sequences. The paper presents a new approach on stockyard planning by intelligent search methods (greedy, beam, and Monte-Carlo Tree Search) and using domain-specific expert knowledge. The approach is evaluated through a series of tests on the model of a real-world port configuration.