Simulation of container ship arrivals and quay occupation

Abstract

This contribution presents a simulation model that generates arrivals of ships over time at a container terminal. The model includes a quay with a given length, a decision module for assigning berths to ships, and a queue for ships for which currently no berth is available. Such models are applied in practice to examine the capacity of the quay and of the quay cranes in scenarios for expected future workloads and ship arrival patterns. We outline the concept for a simple and general simulation model and present some experimental results based on real data. Subsequently, we discuss various extensions of the model that would be necessary to adapt it to a specific terminal. © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011.