As a result of the significant increase in worldwide containerized transportation the development of efficient handling systems in marine terminals has become very important for port competitiveness. In order to optimize the productivity the total handling time for containers in the terminal must be minimized. An overview of the different operational problems in port container terminals is presented and an aggregated model and solution approach is shown. Next, there will be focused on the yard storage problem and a mathematical formulation and solution proposals is presented.

In order to see a shift in modal split in favour of trains as envisioned by the European Union it is necessary for intermodal transport solutions to compete with trucking. Assuming it is possible to compete on price it is necessary to achieve transit times in intermodal networks that are similar to those of direct door-to-door transportation. An intuitive idea is to reduce excess waiting time by synchronizing the schedules of the routes in the intermodal network. In this session we present a model based on the multicommodity network design problem that captures the synchronization aspect by introducing a value of time.

A freight transportation network is a web/information plateforme that allows freight carriers and shippers to collaborate through freight exchanges in order to improve their performance at lower operating costs. However, this collaboration takes place in an environment which is competitive by nature. Consequently, a challenging task is to accuratly manage the interaction between these competitive and collaborative aspects. We intend to achieve this task in two major phases. In the first phase, we focus on the design of an appropriate distributed architecture that accuratly represents the interaction between competitive and collaborative aspects. The second phase is dedicated to the elaboration of an optimizer that takes into account the interaction between local optimization (competition) and global optimization (collaboration).

Purpose of the presentation is the description of a model for strategic planning of a maritime container terminal. In this model, flows of containers are represented by a set of queues, whose dynamic evolutions are described by discrete-time equations; the optimal control problem consists in minimizing the transfer delays of containers inside the terminal and the proposed solution uses a receding-horizon strategy. The application to a real case study will be presented.