OPTIMIZING BED LEVELS IN PORTS BASED ON PORT ACCESSIBILITY

Ports strive to maximize their revenues through being sufficiently nautically accessible for sea-going vessels while minimizing dredging efforts, among many other objectives. These two objectives form an interesting trade-off as they are both dependent on the chosen maintained bed level. Due system complexities, design of levels is typically optimized using individual vessels, thereby neglecting potential interactions between in- and outgoing nautical traffic. may in fact be important. To investigate effect these port accessibility, a novel traffic simulator has been built within open-source discrete-event model. Application simple case study liquid bulk terminal Port Rotterdam, shows that dynamics can lead cascading effects indeed reduce accessibility performance port. Further ongoing research with model expected result more accurate assessments appropriate levels, compared current approaches.