Modelling Support for Maritime Terminals Planning and Operation

The maritime terminals design process is a really complex stepwise series of strategic decision involving the engagement of relevant amount of resources and plays a key role both in the planning of the infrastructures and in quality of provided transport services. In fact operating conditions near the maximum capacity cause congestion effects with the concerned negative consequences on capacity and regularity. Therefore, in order to maximise its effectiveness, a strong need of methodological support is required. At this aim the authors developed different methods and models capable to support some of these decisions: regressive method for preliminary dimensioning of harbour terminals and sea-side operation combinatorial model for traffic analysis and capacity estimation. They are able to be integrated in a chain of models, which has been developed taking into account, within a stepwise methodological approach, dimensions and handiness of the ships, terminal morphology, handling equipment, storage areas, etc., with the aim to support planning process and operational management. In fact the sea-side port operation, characterised by the overlap of many different ships traffic causes very often congestion effects with negative consequences on the transport services regularity. In this framework models capable to relate the terminal utilisation degree with the quality of the transport services are very effective and allow to reach specific objectives: operational time saving; more rational land-use (better planning of sea and land front); possible prevention of losses due to accidents and incidents; variation of performances according to port morphology. The paper gets in a methodological context with a limited amount of approaches, where the practice operates mainly from an heuristic point of view. Therefore the contribution of the proposed approach is finalised to provide a descriptive methodological guide to be used along the whole life cycle of a port: from the evaluation of the preliminary feasibility evaluation through every planning phase, till its operation by a set of rigorous tools able to deal with the planning process of the terminals in a rational way