Microsimulation Model for Analysis of Traffic Flow in Container Port
With the increase of container transportation in past decades, more freight trucks are employed in the container port. One emerging issue is that the container port may encounter traffic congestions when the demand of container transportation increases significantly. Another issue is that port operators need to decide the yard truck fleet size. To respond to these issues, a micro-simulation model is proposed to model the truck movements within the port area. Unlike simulations of traffic in the city area, this model has to simulate the port specified behaviors of trucks as well as the crane operations. A traffic simulation tool Paramics is adopted in this research and its Application Program Interfaces (APIs) are used to develop additional applications to satisfy the needs in modeling the port specified operations. The proposed simulation model is calibrated by minimizing the Root Means Squared Percentage Error (RMSPE) between the observed origin/destination (O/D) trips and the simulated O/D trips of trucks. A scenarios analysis by varying the transportation demand is conducted on the entire terminal, the result shows that a number of road segments within the studied port area will face significant congestions when more trucks are employed. A decision support system based on this micro-simulation model is also proposed in this paper, which is able to determine the yard truck fleet size to optimize the loading/unloading operations in the port.
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Supplemental Notes:
- This paper was sponsored by TRB committee AT050(1) AT050 Paper Review Subcommittee
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Corporate Authors:
500 Fifth Street, NW
Washington, DC United States 20001 -
Authors:
- Lee, Der-Horng
- Wu, Xian
- Jin, Jian Gang
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Conference:
- Transportation Research Board 91st Annual Meeting
- Location: Washington DC, United States
- Date: 2012-1-22 to 2012-1-26
- Date: 2012
Language
- English
Media Info
- Media Type: Digital/other
- Features: Figures; References; Tables;
- Pagination: 15p
- Monograph Title: TRB 91st Annual Meeting Compendium of Papers DVD
Subject/Index Terms
- TRT Terms: Container terminals; Decision support systems; Freight traffic; Loading and unloading; Microsimulation; Origin and destination; Traffic flow; Trucks
- Identifier Terms: Paramics (Computer program)
- Subject Areas: Freight Transportation; Planning and Forecasting; Terminals and Facilities; I72: Traffic and Transport Planning;
Filing Info
- Accession Number: 01366013
- Record Type: Publication
- Report/Paper Numbers: 12-1326
- Files: TRIS, TRB
- Created Date: Mar 23 2012 8:45AM