Generation of Container Flows for Container Terminals
In maritime logistics, simulation and mathematical optimization are commonly used methods for planning, solving problems and evaluating solutions. For testing new solutions under realistic conditions, an extensive amount of actual operational data are urgently needed. Since comprehensive real-life data are often unavailable or classified, the generation of synthetic data is a helpful way to get around this issue. One such instance is when we want to study of the dynamics at a container terminal, the nodes which connect the seaside with the hinterland, transshipping containers between vessels of different sizes, trains, and trucks. The container terminal functions as a buffer between the modes and offers to keep the containers in the yard for some hours or days. The vehicle arrivals and the containers to be unloaded and loaded from the vehicle constitute the container flows through a terminal.
With ConFlowGen, short for Container Flow Generator, an IT tool has been developed at the Institute of Maritime Logistics which is capable of generating such synthetic scenarios. It has been first presented at the LDIC conference 2022 and has been subject to continous development since then. The tool has been deployed in internal projects at the institute as well as in theses of students. The source code is hosted at https://github.com/1kastner/conflowgen and is open source. The project is supervised by Marvin Kastner.
In case the project has sparked your interest, we'd like to learn more about you and maybe even your use case!
| [191075] |
| Title: On Estimating the Required Yard Capacity for Container Terminals. <em>Dynamics in Logistics</em> |
| Written by: Édes, Luc and Kastner, Marvin and Jahn, Carlos |
| in: (2024). |
| Volume: Number: |
| on pages: 171-182 |
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| Editor: In Freitag, Michael and Kinra, Aseem and Kotzab, Herbert and Megow, Nicole (Eds.) |
| Publisher: Springer, Cham and Springer Nature Switzerland: |
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| Address: Cham |
| Edition: |
| ISBN: 978-3-031-56826-8 |
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| DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-56826-8_13 |
| URL: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-56826-8_13 |
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Note: conflowgen
Abstract: Vessel delays and increased terminal call sizes negatively impact the ability to properly plan daily operations at seaport container terminals. Such traffic patterns lead to, among others, infrequent peak loads at the seaside of container terminals, complicating terminal operations. Thus, relying on annual or monthly statistics fails to account for these day-to-day fluctuations. When container terminals are planned, be it a greenfield or brownfield terminal, these variations in operations need to be accounted for. The traditional formula-based approach to design terminals uses annual statistics. In this study, it is first used to produce estimates for the required yard capacity for three existing exemplary container terminals. These are then compared to the results of numerical experiments using the synthetic container flow generator ConFlowGen. The findings reveal that yard capacity requirements fluctuate considerably depending on the timing of vessel arrivals and their call sizes. This dynamic modeling proved particularly beneficial for planning gateway traffic, offering more accurate storage capacity predictions. Suggestions are made for how to further develop ConFlowGen for handling transshipment traffic better in future versions.