A Model-Based Decision Support System for Multiple Container Terminals Hub Management

In recent years the traffic at port areas has rapidly increased. It is estimated that vessels ship over 90% of the international cargos. Due to limited storage capacity, many port containers terminal suffer of serious congestion problems. The temporary storage of the containers discharged by vessels (inbound containers) is one of the most important services of the container terminal. Traditionally, in order to minimize the handling time of containers, a Storage Space Allocation Problem (SSAP) is defined and solved. In some cases, in order to improve the capacity and the reliability of the temporary storage service provided as well as to reduce the related congestion problems, dry port areas are adopted. In these cases the seaport is directly connected with one or more inland terminals, by rail or road, where some of the services provided are outsourced. The adoption of a dry port, however, could increase the levels of traffic in seaport cities and worsen the environmental problems associated with the material handling and transport of the containers. In this paper, a model-based Decision Support System that allows identifying the best strategy optimizing the inter-terminal and intra-terminal flows of the containers is proposed. The model aims at increasing the performance of the hub through the minimization of both the costs and the Carbon Footprint due to the handling (storing and transport) of the containers. The model is based on a heuristic computational algorithm for non-linear programming.