Developing a Tool for Designing a Container Terminal Yard

Container traffic has grown exponentially since 1980 and has become a reliable and efficient means of transportation of goods. In addition, world wide containerization and the availability of cheap and frequent container transport to all corners of the world have had a profound influence on industrial production, transport and the environment. All these aspects result in increasing the pressure on container terminals to provide good service to shipping companies.The Royal Haskoning Maritime Division (hereafter, RHMD) deals internationally with development of different types of terminals such as container, liquid and dry bulk. Due to involvement of numerous stockholders in a port planning project, different design concepts may be considered to satisfy interests of different stockholder; therefore, various scenarios should be studied quantitatively. As an international maritime consultant, it is of crucial importance to own a simple and cheap tool to estimate the dimension of a container terminal. The goal of this study is to develop a tool for engineers to prepare concepts of terminal layout, and estimate the required areas of those concepts, for sake of comparison, for design of a new container terminal. Container terminal design is divided into “waterside” and “landside” areas. Waterside consists of a quay for serving vessels. Landside consists of a storage yard for stacking containers and a hinterland area for serving truck and trains.The developed package, in two consecutive steps, first, accepts the waterside, landside and cost estimation information, such as terminal throughput, downtime, stack occupancy, and second, requires the possible equipment concepts, such as ship to shore cranes and reach stackers etc. Based on the above input data, the performance of the terminal concepts is quantitatively evaluated. Eventually, the dimensions of the container terminal yard are presented. The container terminal design tool is verified against two formerly performed projects (in India and Guatemala) that have been successfully designed at RHMD. The validation showed good performance of the tool, with justified differences compared to actual designed values. As a case study, the package is also applied on design of a container terminal for a port in Angola. In this case study, four different scenarios and their impacts on layout dimensions are considered and analyzed.