Performance Evaluation of Container Terminal Operations

Due to the recent increase in global trade of finished consumer goods the worldwide container traffic has grown dramatically. As a result, new terminals opened and existing terminals face a much higher container turnover than before. In order to meet these challenges, one of the biggest container terminals in Turkey seeks to reconsider its terminal operations and to improve its overall logistics performance. This paper presents an Arena-based simulation model to analyze the terminal operations and to highlight directions for the future development of the terminal configuration and the operational management of the terminal. The simulation model allows analyzing some pre-defined performance criteria such as average productivity, average resource utilization and average waiting time of the resources to identify potential bottlenecks of the operational areas, namely the quay cranes, the storage yard and the transportation system. Preliminary simulation results are presented in the final section of the paper.