loaded or empty ones, loaded containers are either moved to storage area or container yard by yard trucks or rubber tyred gantry cranes (RTG) or moved from one transportation method to another [2] [3]. Security measures and customs delays significantly schedules, longer queues and delays in flow of materials throughout the port. Government agencies including customs administrations and control have faced many challenges regarding managing the increasing growth trade,because they have to simultaneously guarantee law compliances and facilitate lawful trades. In such cases, it is very difficult to keep track of gatekeeping and law compliance due to fast growth of the international trade volume given the limited resources of custom and port administrations and that some of the new customs control systems follow selectivity approach and risk management [4].
Many researches have been conducted to perform safety measures on ports by creating simulating models to anticipate the current situation in order to prevent delays and reduce cost. Studies have been conducted in schedule loading operations in container terminals to integrate optimization algorithms and evaluate performance via
functions in the simulation model. For example, in a research done in [4], the main events are: initializing container sequence according to some dispatching rule, then the sequence will be improved by a genetic algorithm, and the objective function of a given scheduling scheme will be evaluated using a simulation model. Another model is designed to foresee the objective function and to remove poor solutions in order to decrease the simulation model running time. Many tests have shown that scheduling problem of container terminals can be solved by simulation optimization methods [3].
Another popular port problem is the berth allocation problem, which is the assignment of quay space and service time to containers that need to be unloaded or loaded at the terminal. A study was conducted to analyze the berth allocation under uncertain arrival time and operation time. For example, [5] studied the proactive approach to
develop an initial schedule that incorporates a degree of uncertainty expectation during schedules execution and also studied the reactive recovery strategy, which adjusts the initial schedule to handle accurate situations with the lowest penalty cost of deviating from the initial schedule.
Simulation studies are usually used to develop approaches for improving the performance of dynamic and complex systems like an intermodal terminal ports. Simulation helps imitate the port operations and provide predictions of outcomes and performances. Different scenarios can also be tested in a simulation model and the results can be studied and analyzed [6].
This paper addresses the simulation of terminal operations in general, but mainly focuses on modeling a modern ports with modern resources, where cargo changes modes of transportation from a ship to an inland transport mode and vice versa. Data was collected from different papers and ports around the world in order to accurately develop a generic simulation model that can be used with new port terminals without much effort in customization of the model.The overall objective behind this work is to reflect the overall interactions in the real system in a simulated environment, to create a platform that would allow sensitivity analysis, and to develop a tool that would be able to give numeric outcomes of the current system highlighting areas and opportunities of improvement. The proposed simulation model makes analysing some measures simpler, like average resource utilization, the total number of containers that pass through the port, average waiting time in queues among others.