Planning-Level Tool for Assessing and Optimizing Gate Layout for Marine Container Terminals

Abstract

Drayage is a critical link in the intermodal supply chain. In the past decade, a sharp growth in drayage activity has occurred at major container ports in the United States. Because of the high volume of dray-age trucks arriving at container terminals, the trucks often experience significant delays at the terminal gates. Reducing this delay is necessary to improve the efficiency of drayage operations and the entire freight supply chain and to reduce the emissions from diesel-fueled trucks. This study developed a planning-level tool that can be used by design engineers, terminal operators, port authorities, and transportation planners to assess the effectiveness of gate layouts and determine the optimal layout for marine container terminals. Specifically, the analytical tool can be used to determine the average truck queuing time for a given gate con-figuration and to determine how many service gates and queuing lanes are needed to achieve a desired level of service for a given truck arrival rate and truck service rate. This tool accounts for the non deterministic nature of truck arrivals and service times. Specifically, the tool takes into account that trucks arrive as a Poisson stream, a truck is served by one of n gates, and gate service times are independent and identically distributed random variables. In this paper, example applications and results are presented and discussed. In addition, the setup of the online tool is described.