Quantifying the Operational Benefits of Dry Port Integrated Cooperation in Port Clusters: A Microsimulation Study

As marine cargo traffic continues to grow, ports are experiencing increasing problems with congestion. To address this issue without requiring significant capital investment, neighboring ports can share their capacity to meet the rising demand for cargo throughput. While there are many planning level studies on inter-port cooperation, there is a scarcity of operational-level studies, and there is currently no available dry port integrated cooperation scheme for port clusters that utilizes a microsimulation approach. This study aims to contribute to the existing literature by proposing a conceptual port integration scheme that includes a dry port for improved coordination between ports in clusters. The discrete event simulation (DES) approach was used to construct three representative microsimulation models with dry port integration considering vessel transfer policies and no-cooperation scenario. The outputs of the models were evaluated using performance metrics (vessel delays, storage capacities, and the number of serviced vessels) using t-test statistics. The results show that the cooperation scheme with the vessel transfer policy and the strategic management of vessel transfer can significantly reduce the vessel operation delay by over 39% for the no-cooperation scenario with an integrated dry port and this value is further improved to 62% if a simulation-based port selection module (PSM) is used for vessel transfer policy. Additionally, the mean number of containers of the average of two port storages decreased by 40% and further decreased by 69% with the PSM. In terms of decision-making performance for vessel transfer decisions with varying quay lengths, PSM was determined to be superior to the vessel transfer policy considering the number of vessels in port queues. The proposed conceptual port integration model and approach can assist decision-makers in evaluating the effectiveness of different cooperation schemes and vessel transfer policies for adjacent ports in port clusters.