Development and simulation analysis of real-time, dual-load yard truck control systems for seaport container transshipment terminals

We show how a seaport container terminal's long-run average quay crane rate depends on the system that automatically assigns yard trucks to container transportation jobs in the terminal in real time. Several real-time, dual-load yard truck control systems are proposed and evaluated by a fully-integrated, discrete event simulation model of a vessel-to-vessel transshipment terminal. The model is designed to reproduce the microscopic, stochastic, real-time environment at a multiple-berth facility. Overall, the literature still lacks a comprehensive analysis that (1) considers different methods for controlling dual-load vehicles in real time within a fully-integrated, stochastic container terminal environment and (2) compares them in terms of an absolute global performance measure such as average quay crane rate. This paper provides such an analysis.