ITS services for freight transport management in proximity of terminals and logistics hubs. A case study on the Port of Trieste = ITS services for freight transport management in proximity of terminals and logistics hubs. A case study on the Port of Trieste

In this master’s degree thesis, the objective is to identify the effects that may have the implementation of Intelligence Transport Systems (ITS) in order to solve the congestions problems concerning ports and related container terminals, such as long waiting times, saturation and decrease of system throughput. This thesis mainly focuses on the consequences, in the surrounds of maritime terminals, caused by the gigantism of container vessels; these ones, in the past decades, have had an exponential evolution. The aim is to generate a general perspective of the situation and a possible solution, regardless of the chosen case study. The study was centred on the Port of Trieste, knowing that this is one of the most relevant and growing ports in Italy and the Mediterranean zone. Three scenarios have been generated in order to describe the current situation of the traffic conditions, plus one scenario exposing the possible solution. This last emerges thanks to the proposal of the adoption of a series of traffic management strategies; these include the possibility to present a local broadcast system which allows the port to share traffic events and travel time information, with the aim of distributing the condensed flows - that may appear in the peak hours - in a better way. In the first part of the thesis, an introduction about the “ship gigantism” and its relationships with the state of art in literature on this topic is presented. Right after, a presentation of the used software AIMSUN is presented; this is a traffic simulation software that helps modelling and determining the conditions of the different scenarios. Thereafter, a presentation of the case study has been made, giving a brief contextualisation about the city and the port characteristics. The last part presents the description, results and discussion of the four scenarios followed by the conclusions.