Effect of seasonal factors on performance of container terminals

Within the last 20 years, the rapid growth of the container-handling industry has led Hong Kong to become one of the world's busiest container ports, with >11 million twenty-feet equivalent units (TEU) container throughput on a yearly basis. Furthermore, the yearly container throughput is expected to reach 15.5 million TEU by the year 2004. In this paper, an application of a queuing theory model to Hong Kong's Kwai Chung Container Terminals is developed and presented. More specifically, the effect of seasonal changes on the terminals is considered, paying particular attention to interarrival and service time of container vessels. Results show that including seasonal effects in the calculation can improve the accuracy of the model.