On estimating the required yard capacity for container terminals

Vessel delays and increased terminal call sizes negatively impact the ability to properly plan daily operations at seaport container terminals. Such traffic patterns lead to, among others, infrequent peak loads at the seaside of container terminals, complicating terminal operations. Thus, relying on annual or monthly statistics fails to account for these day-to-day fluctuations. When container terminals are planned, be it a greenfield or brownfield terminal, these variations in operations need to be accounted for. The traditional formula-based approach to design terminals uses annual statistics. In this study, it is first used to produce estimates for the required yard capacity for three existing exemplary container terminals. These are then compared to the results of numerical experiments using the synthetic container flow generator ConFlowGen. The findings reveal that yard capacity requirements fluctuate considerably depending on the timing of vessel arrivals and their call sizes. This dynamic modeling proved particularly beneficial for planning gateway traffic, offering more accurate storage capacity predictions. Suggestions are made for how to further develop ConFlowGen for handling transshipment traffic better in future versions.

Subjects

container terminal

maritime logistics

numerical experiments

terminal planning

DDC Class

330: Economics

380: Commerce, Communications, Transport

Options

On estimating the required yard capacity for container terminals