Sizing off-shore transhipment systems: a case study in maritime dry-bulk transportation

This article aims at properly sizing a transhipment system for supplying coal to an electric power plant in the neighbourhood of a river port. The electric power plant under study is expected to satisfy 8% of Italian electricity needs. Raw materials are supplied from all over the world and transported by sea to the plant: since vessels cannot navigate the river (due to river depth), an off-shore transhipment system has been sized through simulation. Service level and costs have been analysed under 16 different scenarios, obtained by varying the number of barges, barge capacity and capacity and cranes rate of the floating transfer station. Thanks to simulation the cost analysis taking into account both expected effects on revenues and investments allowed to preliminary select four best scenarios, whose robustness has been tested by analysing their performance when traffic, weather conditions and vessel scheduling change.