Performance analysis of a Southern Mediterranean seaport via discrete-event simulation

Abstract

Modeling & Simulation (M&S) has proved to be a day-to-day highly indispensable tool for complex systems design, management and monitoring. Therefore, the proposed research study aims to develop a simulation model to recreate the complexity of a medium-sized Mediterranean seaport and analyse the performance evolution of such system with particular reference to the ship turnaround time. After the input data analysis, simulation model development, verification and validation, a design of experiments (according to a 24 factorial experimental design) was carried out in order to evaluate how some critical factors (i.e. inter-arrival times, loading/unloading times, number of cars and trucks to be unloaded/loaded) may affect the seaport's performance. To this end an analysis of variance is performed and an analytical input-output meta-model was created to evaluate the system's performance. © 2013 Journal of Mechanical Engineering. All rights reserved.