A simulation analysis for a transtainer-based container handling facility
Computers and Industrial Engineering
Using simulation to study the impact of work rules on productivity at marine container terminals
Computers and Operations Research
Interblock Crane Deployment in Container Terminals
Transportation Science
Investigation of port capacity under a new approach by computer simulation
Computers and Industrial Engineering - 26th International conference on computers and industrial engineering
Rubber tired gantry crane deployment for container yard operation
Computers and Industrial Engineering
A decision support system for operations in a container terminal
Decision Support Systems
A queuing network model for the management of berth crane operations
Computers and Operations Research
Design, simulation, and evaluation of automated container terminals
IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems
Simulation-based dynamic partitioning of yard crane workload for container terminal operations
SpringSim '09 Proceedings of the 2009 Spring Simulation Multiconference
A service-oriented model for the yard management problem in container terminals
ICCL'11 Proceedings of the Second international conference on Computational logistics
Scheduling yard cranes considering crane interference
ICCL'11 Proceedings of the Second international conference on Computational logistics
Workload-based yard-planning system in container terminals
Journal of Intelligent Manufacturing
Hybrid evolutionary computation methods for quay crane scheduling problems
Computers and Operations Research
Advanced Engineering Informatics
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As more and more container terminals open up all over the world, terminal operators are discovering that they must increase quay crane work rates in order to remain competitive. In this paper we present a simulation study that shows how a terminal's long-run average quay crane rate depends on (1) the length of the storage blocks in the terminal's container yard and (2) the system that deploys yard cranes among blocks in the same zone. Several different block lengths and yard crane deployment systems are evaluated by a fully dynamic, discrete event simulation model that considers the detailed movement of individual containers passing through a vessel-to-vessel transshipment terminal over a several week period. Experiments consider four container terminal scenarios that are designed to reproduce the multi-objective, stochastic, real-time environment at a multiple-berth facility. Results indicate that a block length between 56 and 72 (20-ft) slots yields the highest quay crane work rate, and that a yard crane deployment system that restricts crane movement yields a higher quay crane work rate than a system that allows greater yard crane mobility. Interestingly, a block length of 56-72 slots is somewhat longer than the average block in use today. The experiments provide the first direct connection in the literature between block length and long-run performance at a seaport container terminal. The simulator can be suitably customized to real, pure-transshipment ports and adequately tuned to get an appreciable prescriptive power.