The role of simulation and optimisation in intermodal container terminal

Abstract

A review of how simulation and optimisationtechniques have been applied to help and improve themanagement of intermodal container terminals ispresented. The paper does not provide a detailed listof references and of existing software packages,since it would be very hard for such a list to becomplete and exhaustive. This paper aims to identifythe major problem classes whose instances can befound in the operations of container terminals, then todiscover which approaches have been chosen to solvethese problems and, finally, understand why a givensolution has proven successful and why some problemclasses have not deserved the same attention obtainedby some other classes. On the basis of this review,some research directions are proposed towards theapplication of simulation and optimisation tools andtechniques to the problem of container terminalmanagement.