A Simulation Study of a Storage Policy for a Container Terminal

Abstract

This paper proposes a storage policy for container terminals that handle large numbers of vessels and containers. The storage policy considers the estimated workload at a certain area in a given period; the partition of a storage block into subblocks; the proximities between containers belonging to the same group; the segregation between different groups of containers; and the stack heights of containers. We develop a framework for simulating container repositioning and vehicle congestion and use it to evaluate the yard crane productivity rate, amount of repositioning, and service time of a real-world port terminal. The preliminary result shows that the container terminal operates more efficiently under the storage policy with a bay as a subblock setting.