A comparative analysis of storage and retrieval equipment at a container terminal

In designing container terminals one has to consider the choice for a certain type of storage and retrieval equipment by performing a feasibility and economic analysis. In this paper, we compare, by means of a simulation study, the performance of manned straddle carriers and automated stacking cranes. As the main performance measure, we use the total travel time required to handle storage and retrieval requests from both the sea- and landside of the terminal. It can be concluded that automated stacking cranes outperform straddle carriers in a stack with a span width smaller than nine containers. From that point on straddle carriers reach a comparable performance.