Performance improvements in container terminals through the bottleneck mitigation cycle
article
Container terminal capacity is often limited by (in)efciency bottlenecks. This paper provides the design and proof of concept for the bottleneck mitigation cycle (BMC), consisting of three steps: bottleneck classifcation, detection and alleviation. While, often, the literature only focuses on alleviation of a single bottleneck and ignores bottleneck detection and interdependencies, this research uses the shifting bottleneck method and thereby considers a variety of possible infrastructural and operational bottlenecks. An empirical approach is adopted to fnd the cause of the detected bottleneck and to suggest suitable alleviation measures. Application of the BMC to a simulation model of the Fergusson Container Terminal in the Port of Auckland resulted in productivity improvements of 2–6%. To further improve the BMC, future research directions are to improve the empirical approach used for bottleneck alleviation and to apply the BMC in real-time
Topics
TNO Identifier
977002
ISSN
14792931
Source
Maritime Economics and Logistics, pp. 1-22.
Publisher
Palgrave Macmillan
Pages
1-22