This paper addresses a fleet operation planning problem for a static freight container transportation system in which all the transportation requirements are predetermined at the beginning of a planning horizon. In the transportation system under consideration, a number of loaded containers are to be moved between container storage yards. An optimal fleet planning model is used to determine the minimum number of vehicles required. Based on the results from the optimal model, a tabu-search based algorithm is presented to perform a given transportation requirements with the least number of vehicles. The performance of the new procedure is evaluated through some experiments in comparison with two existing methods, and the it is found that our procedure produces good-quality solutions.