Analysis of berth allocation and inspection operations in a container terminal

Nowadays, approximately 90 per cent of the world's cargoes are moved by vessels, and the majority of general cargoes are transported in containers. Accordingly, a container terminal becomes one of the important nodes in the global supply chain network and it is important to make container terminals operate efficiently. Meanwhile, after the terrorist attack on September 11, 2001, the US Government has proposed and implemented several approaches to improve security systems, including container security inspection operations. These operations may make an inspection center a bottleneck in container terminal operations. In this article, we analyze the container terminal berth allocation and inspection operation systems to find out a proper service rate so that potential bottlenecks can be avoided. We derive lower bounds of the service rate of the inspection center for the deterministic processing time case and perform simulation experiments to validate the lower bounds under stochastic processing time settings.