A Container Ship Traffic Model for Simulation Studies

The aim of this paper is to develop a container ship traffic model for port simulation studies. Such a model is essential for terminal design analyses and testing the performance of optimization algorithms. This kind of studies requires accurate information about the ship stream to build test scenarios and benchmark instances. A statistical model of ship traffic is developed on the basis of container ship arrivals in eight world ports. The model provides three parameters of the arriving ships: ship size, arrival time and service time. The stream of ships is divided into classes according to vessel sizes. For each class, service time distributions and mixes of return time distributions are provided. A model of aperiodic arrivals is also proposed. Moreover, the results achieved are used to compare port specific features.