In the last four decades the container as an essential part of a unit-load-concept has achieved undoubted importance in international sea freight transportation. With ever increasing containerization the number of seaport container terminals and competition among them have become quite remarkable. Operations are nowadays unthinkable without effective and efficient use of information technology as well as appropriate optimization (operations research) methods. In this paper we describe and classify the main logistics processes and operations in container terminals and present a survey of methods for their optimization.

Container terminal operation and operations research — a classification and literature review

The current decade sees a considerable growth in worldwide container transportation and with it an indispensable need for optimization. Also the interest in and availability of academic literatures as well as case reports are almost exploding. With this paper an earlier survey which proved to be of utmost importance for the community is updated and extended to provide the current state of the art in container terminal operations and operations research.

Operations research at container terminals: a literature update

https://web.itu.edu.tr/~keceli/container/genel.pdf

Transshipment of containers at a container terminal: An overview

A survey of berth allocation and quay crane scheduling problems in container terminals

The efficiency of the container port industry has been variously studied utilising either Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) or Stochastic Frontier Analysis (SFA). Given the strengths and weaknesses associated with these two approaches, the efficiency estimates and scale properties derived from these analyses are not always convincing. This paper applies both approaches to the same set of container port data for the world’s largest container ports and compares the results obtained. A high degree of correlation is found between the efficiency estimates derived from all the models applied, suggesting that results are relatively robust to the DEA models applied or the distributional assumptions under SFA. High levels of technical efficiency are associated with scale, greater private-sector participation and with transhipment as opposed to gateway ports. In analysing the implications of the results for management and policy makers, a number of shortcomings of applying a cross-sectional approach to an industry characterised by significant, lumpy and risky investments are identified and the potential benefits of a dynamic analysis, based on panel data, are enumerated.

The technical efficiency of container ports: Comparing data envelopment analysis and stochastic frontier analysis

Berth allocation is essential for efficient terminal utilization in container ports, especially those in Asia. This paper is concerned with a berth allocation problem(BAP) that minimizes the sum of port staying times of ships and that minimizes dissatisfaction of the ships in terms of the berthing order. In general there exist tradeoffs between these objectives. An algorithm is presented to identify noninferior solutions to the BAP. The algorithm is demonstrated with some sample problems and the results indicate the importance of the problem in efficient terminal utilization.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/atr.5670310107

Chan Weng Tat

Papers

Efficient planning of berth allocation for container terminals in Asia