Agent Based Simulation Architecture for Evaluating Operational Policies in Transshipping Containers

An agent based simulator for evaluating operational policies in the transshipment of containers in a container terminal is described. The simulation tool, called SimPort, is a decentralized approach to simulating managers and entities in a container terminal. We use real data from a container terminal, for evaluating eight transshipment policies. The simulation results indicate that good choices of yard stacking and berthing position polices can lead to faster ship turn-around times, for instance, the Overall Time Shortening policy offers a lower cost and when combined with a Shortest Job First sequencing of arriving ships on average yielded a faster ship turn around time. The results also indicated, with respect to the studied performance measures that Stacking by Destination is a good choice of policy.

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