An advanced and flexible simulation tool for environmental impact evaluation and sustainability enhancement in marine ports

Abstract

The sustainability of marine ports (that are primary nodes of global supply chains) is nowadays becoming a critical issue especially for those large ports located close to big cities. As far as the marine ports sustainability is concerned the goal of this paper is twofold. The paper first surveys the state of the art providing the reader with a complete picture of the research activities currently on going. Then, the paper proposes a flexible simulation-based solution able to recreate (after a preliminary customization) any marine port environment (also including multiple terminals) and to take into consideration the main factors affecting the port operations sustainability providing the user with an advanced decision support tool for what-if analysis, environmental impact reduction and sustainability enhancement. Keywords : Supply Chains nodes, marine ports sustainability, Modeling & Simulation.