The storage space allocation and yard crane scheduling in a container terminal are vital to the efficiency of terminal operation. In order to reasonably allocate the storage space and make the yard crane schedule, the regional workload balance method is adopted. When the tasks of one block are given, a mixed integer programming model is established to balance the workload of yard cranes and reduce the unproductive time, taking the safety distance between the yard cranes during the operation process into account. A genetic algorithm is used to solve the model. Numerical experiments with different scale of tasks verify the effectiveness of the adopted method. The results show that the regional workload balance planning method can better solve the optimization problem of storage space allocation and yard crane joint scheduling.