i4Port: Simulation -Drayage Operations Based On Vehicle Communication Technologies At Port Terminals
0The arising demand for goods via ship containers has increased the risk of congestion caused by trucks in container terminals. Therefore, a larger number of container ships are discharging in port terminals large amounts of containers that must be managed and transported in the landside in short periods.
Currently, this large number of containers to be transported requires a more strategic approach to avoid congestion, large delays, and the production of high emissions at the operational terminals; meanwhile, intense congestion leads to bigger delays, higher air pollution, and lower terminal operation efficiency.
Therefore, how to decrease the truck drayage operation time in the terminal is an important issue for terminal operators and truck carriers.
Truck Appointment Systems (TAS) is currently being implemented at container terminals to periodically distribute the arrivals and pick up containers by offering truck carriers a time window in which they can negotiate the transport process time to reduce, waiting times, mitigate congestion, avoid peak hours and avoid long queues at the gates. In this sense, a well-designed TAS, integrated with effective planning of truck operations, offers benefits both to truck carriers and to the port terminal.
The optimization method here proposed uses vehicle communication technologies based on a time reservation approach to improve current TAS developments. In our model, each truck carrier acts as a driver agent (DA) and the port terminal as the management agent (MA). Each DA can make a reservation in time and space for its corresponding container by communicating its position, velocity, and desired arrival time to the container terminal in real-time.
Then an internal simulation is carried out followed by a control policy that defines if the desired reservation can be accepted, denied, or canceled depending on the current reservations, if there is no conflict between these, the DA can then proceed to make the corresponding drayage operations. This proposed approach aims to reduce congestion and improve drayage operation delays at container terminal ports by using vehicle communication in real-time.