Impact of giant containerships on terminal logistics and landside road traffic: assessment of I2V on queuing phenomena at the port of Trieste

The current Master degree thesis is aimed at identifying which could be the effects of ITS (Intelligent Transport Systems) introduced in container terminals, or more generally in ports, as far as heavy-duty vehicles (HDV) queuing is concerned. The thesis work is mainly focused on container movements and handling because of the impressive impacts that gigantism of container vessels is implying and is expected to bring in congestion phenomena within and around maritime terminals. The approach is general and applicable to any port, however the main focus is devoted to the port of Trieste, one of the most relevant and increasing ones in Italy and in the Mediterranean Sea, in terms of container and ro-ro traffic. The starting idea is to take into consideration the possibility of communicating between the infrastructure and the HDV (V2I) in order to reorganise and distribute, in terms of time and provided that buffers are available, the traffic flow directed to the port for both import and export, with the aim to reduce the peak distribution of arrivals in these nodes. The proposal of this thesis, i.e. the is represented by the introduction of distributed buffer areas for temporary stops of HDV approaching the terminal, depending on congestion condition in that area. In order to analyse the queuing with related phenomena and to study both the input and the output data, a discrete-event simulation software, the Arena software of the Rockwell Company, has been adopted. In the first part of the thesis, an introduction to main problems of “ship gigantism” are underlined together with the state of the art in literature on this subject. The second part collects the state of art about the ITS systems with reference to the subject dealt with and about the use of Arena for terminal problems studies. The third part contains a general overview on discrete-event simulation, a description on how the software Arena operates, followed by a brief theoretical remark on the queuing theory. The fourth part collects the explanation about the structure of the Arena model, so as it has been built for this purpose. The fifth part collects the simulations performed according to different scenarios. The last part contains the conclusions and a proposal for solving the analysed problem.