Continuous material flow systems: analysis of marine ports handling bulk materials

Continuous material flow systems operating in bulk port marine terminals give rise to networks of mineral flows through nodes experiencing random stoppages. Material arrives at the system via trains and departs from the system via ships. Operational aspects of the material flow are quite varied and complicated. Therefore, a decomposition approximation method is proposed to study the steady-state behavior of the system to produce performance measures such as the long run pile levels, down time probabilities and the system throughput. Pseudo failure and repair rates of the subsystems are obtained and the subsystems are studied within an iterative algorithm. Numerical examples are provided.