Factors affecting seaport capacity

One of the most important dynamic problems that decision makers face in today's maritime ports is where and how to upgrade the existing port capacity for rising port demands due to continuous growth in containerized trade and the tendency for bigger ships to visit ports. Academia and corporate interests in capacity planning and capacity management have risen considerably in recent years. To establish the field further, the purposes of this paper are three fold. It (1) identifies consequences of capacity shortage at seaports and corresponding supply chains; (2) offers a conceptual framework to summarize the research in the field concerned with the factors influencing seaport capacity using a holistic approach after reviewing academic and industry-related papers; (3) and finally, concludes by suggesting promising research tracks on factors affecting capacity. In Particular, we explore the specific roles of deterministic simulation and stochastic simulation as future research directions in this rapidly changing and challenging maritime domain. This study is significant as there is limited literature on this subject concerning factors affecting capacity and studies carried out so far on capacity improvement mechanisms are constrained principally by the lack of integrated points of view.