Marine container terminal configurations for efficient handling of mega-containerships

This paper addresses two innovative design alternatives of marine container terminals for efficient ship handling service in the mega-containership era. They serve a mega-ship from two sides at dedicated berths. One of the key issues for higher utilization is how the dedicated berths serve other ships efficiently when they are idle. For this, we develop efficient heuristics for the berth allocation of the two terminals to identify a more productive terminal among them in terms of the total service time of both ordinary and mega-ships. A wide variety of experiments show the channel terminal is the most preferred. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.