The development of comprehensive models for strategic and tactical planning of container terminals offers significant research opportunities, as well as the automation of container terminals, that is real-time decision and control of operations. For this reason, both new models and appropriate solution methods are required. The queue model described in this paper for the optimization of operations inside maritime container terminals is just an aggregate model for the strategic and tactical planning of terminals; the purpose, at the strategic level, is that of dimensioning the system, in terms of number of handling equipment, lay-out and size of the terminal, and so on. Moreover, at a tactical-operational level, the idea proposed in this work is the integration of the queue model with a simulation tool able to reproduce the real operativity of the terminal. A modeling approach is proposed in this field. This model is devoted to the optimization of container transfers in a seaport container terminal, in which the position and the movement of containers are represented by a set of queues, whose dynamic evolutions are described by discrete-time equations. The problem, aiming at minimizing the transfer delays of containers in the terminal, is stated as an optimal control problem whose solution is sought by adopting a receding-horizon strategy. This model and the relative optimization problem can be applied for the strategic planning or at a tactical-operational level; for both the cases, the application to real case studies is presented and the relative results are provided.