Simulation Modeling and Analysis of Complex Port Operations with Multimodal Transportation

World trade has been increasing dramatically in the past two decades, and as a result containers exchange has grown significantly. Accordingly, container terminals are expanding to meet this increase and new container ports have opened. Ports with one or more container terminals are considered complex systems in which many resources, entities and transporters interact to achieve the objective of safely moving containers delivered by ships inland as well as loading containers delivered by trucks and rail onto ships. Ports with multimodal transportation systems are in particular complex as they typically operate with ships arriving to one or more terminals, multiple quay cranes, rubber tyred gantry cranes, trains, and trucks delivering containers of different types to terminals. With several resources of different types working and interacting, the system can be so complex that it is not easy to predict the behavior of the system and its performance metrics without the use of simulation. In this paper, a generic discrete-event simulation that models port operations with different resource types including security gates, space, rubber tyred gantry cranes, trains, quay cranes, and arriving and departing ships, trucks, and trains is presented. The analysis will entail studying various scenarios motivated by changes in different inputs to measure their impact on the outputs that include throughput, resource utilization and waiting times. © 2013 The Authors