The Determination of Times of Transhipment Processes at Maritime Container Terminals

Nowadays managers and decision-makers around the world seek every opportunity to lower costs of the ship's mooring time at seaports. In this article, main operations taking place at maritime container terminals are first disaggregated in several elementary activities. Then the vessel cycle time is analysed while separately investigating the STS (Ship to Shore) crane cycle time, the RTG (Rubber-Tyred Gantry) crane work cycle time and the IMV (Internal Movement Vehicle) transfer time. A triangular distribution describes times of each of the container handling stages while the PERT (Program Evaluation and Review Technique) method is used to estimate the total time for all reloading activities. The paper demonstrates the proposed method effectiveness with data of Baltic Container Terminal (BCT) Gdynia. The use of formulas developed for the calculation of times of individual operations that affect the reloading of a container at maritime container terminals enables an in-depth assessment of the effectiveness of the reloading processes. Thus, the proposed tool gives terminal managers opportunity to track which stage of the container reloading consumes most time and generates biggest costs.