A comparison of the performance of automated vehicles in container terminals

Since the beginning of the container era in the middle of the last century, the containerization is growing. Nowadays more than 90 percent of the world's non-bulk cargo is being transported in a container. With many shipping liners deploying container vessels on the world seas, the competition is strong. Therefore the need to lower the price per container has resulted in the development of vessels with increasing sizes. Continuing on cost reduction, shipping lines tend to make fewer port calls with their vessels. Consequently the call sizes, i.e. the number of containers that have to be unloaded and loaded per vessel in a port, will increase. Because of the competition between harbours and container terminals, terminal operators are forced to handle container vessels as fast as possible while reducing the operational costs. Especially in high labour regions, the labour costs are a large part of the operational costs of container terminals. Accordingly, in 1993, automation in container terminals has been introduced at ECT's Delta terminal in Rotterdam in order to reduce the operational costs. Nowadays there are several (semi-) automated container terminals worldwide and currently there are four in the planning stage. In the first automated container terminals automated guided vehicles (AGVs) were used for the supply and discharge of containers at the quay cranes. Because the realized quay crane productivities were lower than the theoretical ones, and this is partly caused by the transportation vehicles, other vehicles such as the Lift-AGV (L-AGV) and the automated shuttle carrier (AShC), were developed. In this research a comparison is made between several state-of-the-art automated vehicles to find out which is the best performing vehicle type. The characteristics of the investigated automated vehicles are elaborated to gain insight in the possibilities of the vehicles. These characteristics are inuencing the behaviour of the automated vehicles in container terminals. Whether or not the interchange between the stack or quay cranes is linked and what the vehicles manoeuvrability is. Due to the complexity of the system a simulation model should assist in answering the research questions. Taking into account the requirements, a simulation model has been set up using the simulation library of TBA. A benchmark model has been defined using the dimensions of automated container terminals which are currently being build of already exist. For each type of vehicle, terminal layouts are designed within the benchmark model. The design of these layouts largely depend on the size of the vehicle and the manoeuvrability, which manoeuvres can it perform and how much space is needed. An implementation for each type of vehicle and each terminal layout has been made in the model. Several peak scenarios with a varying number of vehicles has been performed in order to obtain results which assist in answering the research questions. The output of the model is also used to gain more insight in the behaviour of the different vehicle types. The results must also contribute to the validation of the model. Considering the quay crane productivities, it can be concluded that according to the results of the performed experiments the L-AGV is the best performing vehicle, however the differences with the other vehicles are not very large. This result deviates from the expectation, which can be explained using the generated output of the simulation. However the use of another type of quay crane could be beneficial for other vehicle types.Mechanical, Maritime and Materials EngineeringMarine and Transport TechnologyTransport Engineering and Logistics2013.TEL.779