Efficient gate system operations for a multipurpose port using simulation-optimization

Port capacity is determined by three major infrastructural resources namely, berths, yards and gates. The advertised capacity is constrained by the least of the capacities of the three resources. While a lot of attention has been paid to optimizing berth and yard capacities, not much attention has been given to analyzing the gate capacity. The gates are a key node between the land-side and sea-side operations in an ocean-to-cities value chain. The gate system under consideration, located at an important port in an Asian city, is a multi-class parallel queuing system with non-homogeneous Poisson arrivals. It is hard to obtain a closed form analytic approach for such a system. In this paper, we describe an application of simulation techniques in analyzing the performance of gate operations. Further, we develop an optimization model that is integrated with simulation techniques to suggest efficient lane management policies for an outbound gate system.