Reduction of ship waiting time at port container terminal through enhancement of the tug/pilot machine operation

Abstract

Port container terminal is one of the important transition points in the shipping industry. Competitiveness is an important factor for port container terminal with the increase in the number of port terminals globally. Vessel processing time port terminals is one of the important factors that influence the port terminal attractiveness. In addition, most port terminals tried to reduce ship waiting time with enhancement of their facilities. This paper focused on the ship waiting time at the berthing area of port container terminal, and tried to solve the queuing problem at ship tugging operation in order to reduce the average waiting time. The data was collected from a major port container terminal in Malaysia as a case study. The port terminal is modeled with Arena 13.5 simulation software and model validation was done based on real data which was taken from the case study. Different scenarios were then tested on the tugging operation at the port simulation model. The results show that after the implementation of these scenarios, the average ship waiting time at the berthing area decreased dramatically from 180 hours to 140 hours for each ship.