Simulation study of different yard and crane side operations at a container terminal

Abstract

With the expected growing in maritime container terminal and the exponential growth in vessels size, container terminals operations are facing higher demands. Being able to simulate the operations that occur inside container terminals can lead to obtain valuable insights, help to identify possible problems and solve them, and also some decision-making tools can be created. This thesis, then, uses simulation to model the operations of a container terminal in Denmark. The movements of containers from the storage area to the quay crane for loading and from the quay crane to the storage area for unloading are modelled. The simulation software used is AnyLogic. Once the model is created, an explanation of it and its limitations are presented. The databases used to run the simulation are explained and a validation of the model is performed with real data. After that, a probabilistic function to generate new data is found in order to run simulations of future vessels. Four different vessels are analysed with real data and generated data. A comparison of the results is made and some conclusions are extracted. To end, some recommendations for future work are presented.