Aiming at container slots allocation in yard, which is affected by a container delivery appointment system, a 3D graph representation method of delivery sequence and slots allocation is proposed, and a solving method for the expected value of reshuffles and gantry crane traveling distances is prsented. An optimization model of export container slots is established based on graphs to minimize crane traveling distance and reshuffles. A tabu-search algorithm is proposed with graph representation to narrow down searching space and to optimize searching direction, thus its convergence rate can be accelerated. Experiment results show that a satisfied solution can be gained in a reasonable time by using the proposed algorithm, and the model can save more than 20% operation cost than the determinative one.