Disruption management for truck appointment system at a container terminal: A green initiative

Abstract

Disruption often occurs in both land-side and sea-side operations at a container terminal, causing substantial interference of scheduled operations and poor green performance. The land-side disruption is rarely researched, and this paper addresses the ordinary level of such disruption where typically some truck arrivals deviate from their schedule in the appointment system. The aim is to find a response strategy that can maintain high resilience ability of the system in neutralizing the impact of disruptions. First, we consider different levels of late or early arrivals, as well as non-appointed arrivals at a container terminal that is running an appointment system. Second, we propose some response strategies to cope with different levels of disruptions, and evaluate their resilience ability with two Key Performance Indicators (KPIs): total waiting time of on-time trucks and total idling emissions of all trucks, in order to balance the service quality to punctual arrivals and green performance of the whole system. Third, we conduct a sensitivity analysis using a discrete event simulation to understand the performance of the proposed strategies. Considering both KPIs, the best strategy in most scenarios is a combined one based on priority and yard-crane moving distance; its performance depends primarily on the concentration level of container locations and secondly on the system utilization. In the other scenarios that have low arrival punctuality, the best strategy could focus purely on yard-crane moving distance, especially when the first KPI is given lower weight than the second one.