Queueing Analysis of Port Systems with Offshore Container Unloading: Queueing Analysis of Mobile Harbor System

摘要

As seaborne trade has increased, so has worldwide maritime container transport. Container transportation market de- mand is predicted to exceed existing port capacity. To resolve this capacity problem, a new port concept based on off- shore unloading operations has recently been proposed as an alternative. In this new port concept, an arriving contai- nership receives unloading service in the open sea from transportation units with a finite capacity. The transportation units travel between the containership in the sea, transferring containers from the ship to the land berth. While design- ing an efficient port system requires evaluating performance measures for the concept, traditional analytic solutions, such as queueing formulae, do not fit the system well because of the behavior of transportation units. Motivated by this absence of results, we study a design problem for the port system based on queueing evaluation techniques. We derive the exact solution for the mean service time of a ship in the system with offshore operation, and incorporate this service time with existing queueing models to derive performance measures. M/G/m and M/G/m/m queueing models will be modified. The solution can be used to address unloading resource optimization problems in port design. To use this concept to design an efficient harbor system, we apply our results to the port of Surabaya in Indonesia.