A simulation study of the fleet sizing problem in pilotage and tug services: Case study of Tanjung Perak port, Surabaya

Abstract

Pilotage and tug services are one of the essential services in port operation especially for ports which has channel like Tanjung Perak. There are important interactions between decision on sizing tugboats and decision on utilizing that fleet. This paper combines simulation and assignment model for supporting strategic fleet sizing problem at ports where a Monte Carlo simulation is built to capture the behavior of the real system, whereas the assignment model is built to allocate tugboats near optimal. This approach is quite flexible in the sense that the simulation part can deal with the stochastic aspects with a quite precisions and the assignment model can easily change the tugboats configurations. The performance of the model developed is evaluated by comparing the real data and the simulation results with high precision. The methodology developed in this paper provided valuable decision support on strategic fleet sizing problems in pilotage and tug services at the port.