Congestion and truck service time minimization in a container terminal

The objective of this paper is to address the minimization of truck service times at container terminals while respecting a certain level of congestion. Truck congestion at terminal gates is a major concern for container terminals, especially considering the increasing volumes of goods they have to manage. Truck arrivals, if not properly managed, can result in long queues of trucks, decreasing their service level and can lower the terminal productivity, affecting all the other areas of the terminal. The terminal road cycle is described through some mathematical relations implemented in a spreadsheet; these relations are the basis of a decision support system that, for each truck having executed the check-in,decides if it should be allowed to enter the terminal and, if yes, which service level it will be given. Based on a big container terminal located in Northern Mediterranean, the proposed approach has been successfully tested on different scenarios, with different level of terminal congestions, yard filling and trucks arrivals. The results obtained have shown that the tool is able to effectively reduce congestion inside the terminal by indicating if a truck can enter the gate in order to be served within a predetermined service time, or if it has to stop outside due to the high congestion level inside the terminal. Moreover, a series of KPIs have been defined and analyzed to assess various scenarios which differ in the number of truck arrivals and in the initial state of the terminal; this evaluation also enables to size the number of equipment needed by the container terminal in order to properly carried out all its operations.