FIRST AUTOMATIC EMPTY CONTAINER YARD WITH NOOPERATOR IN CHINA

摘要

Due to the boom in world trade with leaps and bounds, portauthorities are looking into ways of making facilities moreefficient. To build Shanghai as the international shippingcenter, it is the strategic step to found Shanghai as theinternational container hub port. The Shanghai port mustimprove the competitive ability to cope with this dynamicchallenge. However the existing piling capability of thecontainer yard in Shanghai port is not satisfied therequirement today. The most advanced automatic containerterminals in the world are based on the use of AGVs(Automatic Guided Vehicles), which are not accord with theport environment of Shanghai. The port authorities have tofind and deploy effective container handling systems in orderto increase the throughput of the current container terminalsfor the progressively enormous pressure rooting in the newmassive container ships and scarcity of the yard land and soon. In this paper, the first automatic empty container yard(AECY) with no operator in China is proposed, which isconstructed and located in Shanghai Port Container Co., Ltd.Waigaoqiao Terminal Branch. In AECY, the automatichandling system in relay is adopted, which is the new processprocedure and uses two new types of RMG and bufferplatform. Besides, a simulation model is developed and usedto simulate this new AECY and evaluate its performance. Thesimulation results show that AECY can be effectively adoptedin combination with the optimized loading, unloading list,lower waiting time, and reduce the number of crane conflictson the yard and the average length of the truck queues in theterminal. Therefore the new process procedure of AECY andits simulation results help to improve the efficiency, and thecapacity of container yard, and meet the future demand of thecontainer terminal of Shanghai international shipping center.