SIMULATION FOR THE EVALUATION OF OPTIMISED OPERATIONS POLICIES IN A CONTAINER TERMINAL

A simulation model must be used to evaluate the impact of new operations policies, not only to validate the policies, but also as a tool to convince the decision-makers of the potential advantages in adopting the proposed enhancements in the management. Terminal resource allocation policies and ship loading/unloading policies are obtained by means of Operations Research techniques for the case study of La Spezia Container Terminal (LSCT); a simulation model of the terminal is designed, implemented and validated. The simulation model is used to test the policies and to assess their robustness in front of the inherent stochasticity of the real world.