The impact of lanes segmentation and booking levels on a container terminal gate congestion

María D. Gracia, Rosa G. González-Ramírez and Julio Mar-Ortiz ()
Additional contact information
María D. Gracia: Universidad Autónoma de Tamaulipas
Rosa G. González-Ramírez: Universidad de Los Andes Chile
Julio Mar-Ortiz: Universidad Autónoma de Tamaulipas

Flexible Services and Manufacturing Journal, 2017, vol. 29, issue 3, No 5, 403-432

Abstract: Abstract Recent trends in port performance improvement include the coordination of intermodal transport logistics to reduce congestion and inefficiencies generated at the gates of the terminals. Congestion at the gate of a terminal generates several problems such as pollution and long waiting times for truck carriers. As part of the strategies and best practices to reduce congestion, some ports worldwide have implemented advanced booking systems in order to coordinate truck arrivals and deliveries at the gate of their container terminals. We will refer to these systems as truck appointment systems. In general terms, a truck appointment system provides a mechanism where truck carriers coordinate their time of arrival at the container terminal based on an advanced booking. In this way, gate managers are able to better plan their port operations and equipment allocation, to reduce the waiting times of trucks and improve the turnaround time for container deliveries. In order to account for the real benefits of such systems, the particular conditions of each container terminal need to be considered. In this paper, a case study of a Chilean port terminal is analyzed. The aim is to provide recommendations that may reduce congestion and improve the container terminal´s gate control of truck arrivals, turnaround times and container deliveries by means of efficient lane segmentation policies. Several scenarios were examined under which different booking levels are considered for an environment in which the arrival of containers can vary significantly from day to day and on a seasonal basis. As a basis for our study a fractional factorial design is performed in order to analyze the impact of controllable factors on two service levels measures, which reduce the number of scenarios needed to obtain robust conclusions.

Keywords: Intermodal coordination; Truck appointment system; Simulation analysis; Ports optimization; Port terminal congestion (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10696-016-9256-4 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:flsman:v:29:y:2017:i:3:d:10.1007_s10696-016-9256-4

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/journal/10696

DOI: 10.1007/s10696-016-9256-4

Access Statistics for this article

Flexible Services and Manufacturing Journal is currently edited by Hans Günther

More articles in Flexible Services and Manufacturing Journal from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().