Controls: Emulation to improve the performance of container terminals

Nowadays container terminals are struggling with a continuously increasing volume. Therefore, they are searching for solutions to increase throughput capacity without expanding their physical footprint. Furthermore, they aim to increase their productivity on vessels in order to be able to handle bigger ships with larger call sizes in the same time frame. A terminal operating system (TOS) plays a major role in today¿s terminal operations as it supports planning, scheduling and equipment control. Recently more and more tasks are performed by the TOS - stowage planning, grounding decisions, equipment dispatching - and therefore, they need to be well-tuned to the operation, which remains a terminal specific characteristic. In this paper, an approach is presented to test and tweak the TOS and train operators on a virtual terminal. The implementation of this approach has been successfully applied during several TOS update or replacement projects for Rotterdam, Hong Kong, Norfolk, Virginia and Antwerp.