Applicability of Planning and Control in a Port Environment

Abstract

There is a lot of focus on intermodal transportation, maritime efficiency and port governance in the literature, but there is little regarding how to plan and coordinate activities in ports, especially in the context of small and medium sized ports. This paper will approach the planning tasks in port by using knowledge from the well-investigated field of planning and control in manufacturing and make use of the structure of strategic, tactical and operational planning, but relating this to the non-hierarchical setup found in most smaller ports. The paper finds that the general planning functions found in manufacturing planning and control can be applicable if approached as a way to align capacity and demand, and not focusing on the methods in the planning functions. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2014.