Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board

This paper discusses the evolution of U.S. seaports and the environmental initiatives enabling them to modernize and expand. These initiatives, such as the Port of Los Angeles Clean Air Action Plan, will likely be seen as watershed moments for transformational changes in the port and maritime industries. Seaport-related environmental and public health issues are addressed; solutions posed by local, federal, and international organizations are discussed and analyzed; and innovations in emissions-reducing technologies for both oceangoing vessels and the cargo-handling equipment employed by seaports and the areas surrounding these ports are explored.

U.S. ports need to better understand climate change and how it may affect them. In the coming decades, ports are likely to experience higher sea levels and storm surges, as well as other direct and indirect impacts, due to climate change. Most ports do not appear to be thinking about, let alone actively preparing to address, the effects of climate change. Ports do not have specific information about either the types of impacts that they can expect on their facilities or the probabilities of different types of impacts occurring. Although climate change science is making considerable advances, projections of impacts at levels smaller than the regional scale are not available. In addition, ports’ typical planning processes are ill equipped to respond to the high levels of uncertainty associated with the impacts of climate change, the timescales of climate change, and the geographical scale of climate change. The data that ports typically use for planning purposes do not incorporate climate change forecasts. Some ports also believe that climate change does not pose an immediate threat to their facilities. However, several ports are beginning to think about how to prepare for climate change. These include the Port of Miami (Miami, Florida), the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the Massachusetts Port Authority, the Port of Seattle (Seattle, Washington), the Port of Corpus Christi (Corpus Christi, Texas), and the Georgia Ports Authority. To help these and other ports assess their risk, more and better data are needed, as well as better planning tools and methods.

A comparative, up-to-date, critical review of existing research efforts relating to berth planning is presented. Existing models are critically reviewed on the basis of their efficiency in addressing key operational and tactical questions relating to vessel service and their relevance and applicability to different marine terminal operator berth-planning strategies and contractual service arrangements between terminal operators and ocean carriers. The strengths and deficiencies of the existing models in addressing real-world problems in a systemic and coherent manner are discussed. The paper concludes with some insights for future research issues.

This paper discusses the implementation of Lean Enterprise management, principles, and tools in seaport operations. The paper begins with an overview of the necessary management training, strategy, and structure necessary for the successful implementation of Lean Enterprise. An analysis of the appropriate Lean Enterprise tools to be applied in seaport operations is provided, and specific examples of the implementation of those tools at the Port of Mobile in Mobile, Alabama, are cited. The paper also investigates the importance of integrating Lean Enterprise concepts into support functions such as accounting, maintenance, and human resources to enhance overall port operations in a holistic manner. The paper concludes with a discussion of the keys to the successful implementation of Lean Enterprise and the issues relative to sustaining improvement efforts as well as suggestions for additional focuses of improvement for implementing Lean Enterprise in port operations.

Road freight transportation has increased dramatically over recent years, as have accompanying impacts such as congestion, noise, and pollution. As a result, European governments and the U.S. government started implementing policies to promote alternatives to road transportation, such as logistic chains containing a short sea shipping (SSS) link. Shipping by road is a more flexible means of transportation than shipping by sea, which is usually cheaper. Therefore, to move traffic to SSS chains, it is necessary to provide fast, frequent, and reliable maritime transportation. In this sense, roll-on–roll-off (RoRo) vessels are the most convenient types of vehicles to be used because they have shorter dwell times in port. Therefore, the level of this kind of traffic is likely to increase dramatically. To cope with the increase in traffic, terminal managers must decide whether a change in the terminal's operation would suffice or whether the enlargement or construction of a new terminal, given the level of service provided, is necessary. This paper proposes a methodology that can be used to relate the level of service in a RoRo terminal to its capacity from the ship's point of view. This goal is achieved by using several quality indicators that, in turn, should allow terminal managers to foresee what the level of service that they offer to shipping companies would be, given the numbers of arrivals and their distribution, as well as the terminal's performance. The paper ends by applying the methodology to a real terminal in Barcelona, Spain.

This paper addresses a critical component of truck appointment systems: scheduling rules. The goal of this study is to gain an understanding of how the various scheduling rules affect resource utilization and truck turn time in grounded operations. Such an understanding could influence terminal operators and appointment service providers to make changes to their current scheduling practice. To this end, this study seeks to develop a framework for the evaluation of (a) the performance of various simple appointment-scheduling rules under a variety of operating scenarios and (b) the major factors affecting the performance of scheduling rules. This study considers two types of appointment-scheduling strategies that were adopted from the health care sector: (a) individual appointment systems (IASs) and (b) block appointment systems. To determine the effectiveness of the scheduling strategy, this study relies on a simulation model of a container terminal. Simulation is used because it provides a more realistic representation of the complex operations at terminals. In addition, it circumvents the restrictive assumptions of analytical methods. The simulation model developed was constructed with the Flexsim CT discrete event simulation software, the first commercially available off-the-shelf simulation tool for container terminals. The experimental results show a clear benefit for a terminal without an appointment system to use the IAS. Such a scheduling system keeps the yard cranes highly utilized, and it improves the internal yard turn time by about 44%. With the proper spacing between appointments, the IAS can be effective even when a good portion of trucks are walk-ins, no-shows, or late (up to 1 h).

As a consequence of the continuing growth of container volume and the introduction of 13,000 containerships carrying 20-ft-equivalent-unit (TEU) containers into major trade routes, the port industry is under pressure to come up with the necessary capacity to accommodate the increasing freight volume. One critical issue is the gate capacity of marine container terminals. Limited gate capacity leads to congestion. The harbor trucking industry operates in a competitive environment, and gate congestion is detrimental to its economic well-being. This paper applies a multiserver queuing model to analyze gate congestion and to quantify the truck waiting cost. An optimization model was developed to minimize the total gate system cost with data from field observations. A case study was applied to analyze gate congestion behavior and the truck waiting cost. The sensitivity of the model is discussed. With optimization, the truck waiting cost can be drastically reduced. Several congestion mitigation alternatives can be derived from the optimization model; the use of a truck appointment system seems to be the most viable way to reduce gate congestion and increase system efficiency.

Navigational collisions are one of the major safety concerns in many seaports. Despite the extent of work recently done on port navigational safety, little is known about harbor pilots’ perception of collision risks in port fairways. The study described in this paper used a hierarchical ordered probit model to investigate the associations between perceived risks and the geometric and traffic characteristics of fairways and pilot attributes. Perceived risk data, collected through a risk perception survey of Singapore port pilots, were used to calibrate the model. The intraclass correlation coefficient justified the use of the hierarchical model rather than an ordinary model. The results show higher perceived levels of risk in fairways attached to anchorages and in those featuring sharper bends and higher traffic operating speeds. Lower levels of risk were perceived in fairways attached to the shoreline and confined waters and in those with one-way traffic, a traffic separation scheme, cardinal marks, and isolated danger marks. The level of risk was also found to be perceived higher at night.

This paper examines the market volumes, service times, vessel characteristics, and economics for marine highways that would serve the U.S. Pacific Coast. This work was performed under contract to the Center for Commercial Deployment of Transportation Technologies. Market volumes were assessed by routes of interest and by filtering for cargo that would be eligible for marine highway service on the basis of the drayage distance and other factors. Sufficient daily truckload volumes exist in the Northern California to Southern California route to justify marine highways with multiple daily sailings of vessels with capacities of 450 to 700 trailers, should service times and economics prove to be competitive enough to divert cargo. Market volumes in the California to Pacific Northwest route are sufficient for daily sailings of smaller vessels with capacities of approximately 150 to 200 trailers. A door-to-door supply chain perspective was maintained, and discrete-event simulation was used to assess the service times and the vessel speeds required. The resulting voyage analysis served as input to both a parametric analysis of vessel characteristics and an economic analysis of marine highways by considering all maritime and land-side cost elements associated with the door-to-door movement of trailers. It was concluded that current truck rates are not high enough for marine highways to compete on the basis of cost in short next-day-turnaround markets, such as Northern California to Southern California. Marine highways are viable for longer routes such as those from California to the Pacific Northwest, where truck rates are higher and both distance and trucking hours-of-service regulations permit vessels to be time competitive at lower speeds.

Ever-growing supply chains and the corresponding demand for efficiency and reliability necessitate improved performance and measurement standards. Enhanced competitiveness is the unifying element within every industry and drives improved performance and a demand for high-quality services. New methods and tools for measurement of the performance of inland waterway navigation are therefore needed. The real challenge is to develop internationally applicable performance indicators (PIs) to ensure correct decision making and improved competitiveness. Therefore, it is essential to consider the related processes, the stakeholders being addressed, and the scope of the underlying system. The purpose of the present work is to reveal that PIs are more than just measurements of performance. There is a need for a commonly accepted approach that supports the development of a consistent PI system within the inland waterway industry.

Lock deterioration in a waterway network requires timely maintenance to maintain navigability and regular lockage service. Locks degrading over time have reduced capacities and increased service times. Because demand responds to service changes, the objective function maximizes the overall net benefits rather than the minimization of costs. To maximize the net benefits, it is important to schedule maintenance that preserves lock conditions above threshold values, provides minimum acceptable service, and reduces the risks of serious failures. With constrained budgets, network-level maintenance can be scheduled over a planning horizon. A waterway model that combines simulation and optimization was developed to allocate maintenance funds and to schedule maintenance tasks optimally. Numerical cases are evaluated by parallel processing. The promising demonstration of simulation-based optimization shows the applicability of the proposed methodology to network-level and component-level maintenance planning and scheduling.