Decision support systems for container handling in port operation

Abstract

Since container ships and port terminals involve a huge capital investment and significant daily operating costs, it is of crucial importance to efficiently utilize the internal resources of container terminals and transportation systems at South Asia Gateway Terminals Pvt Ltd. This in turn requires highly sophisticated control strategies in order to meet the desired performance measures. In shipping port sector, containers are the most dynamic and complex to manage. To provide adequate-, strategy for the increasing traffic, ports must either expand facilities or improve efficiency of operations. The main goal of the present work is to be used as a help tool in a port decision support system. Keeping align with the organizations expansion and improvement process, Information Technology Department is extending Decision Support System capability between its operation managers. Currently there is no Decision Support System to take day to day decision at South Asia Gateway Terminals Pvt Ltd. Operation department managers want to track their operator activities when something goes wrong. As well as they need daily activity reports in some specific area. Variety of inter-related decisions has been made during daily operations at a container terminal. The ultimate goal of these decisions is to minimize the berthing time of vessels, the resources needed for handling the workload, the waiting time of customer trucks, and the congestion on the roads and at the storage blocks and docks inside the terminal; and to make the best use of the storage space. Given the scale an~ complexity of these decisions, it is essential to use decision support tools to make them. The project goal is implementing a system using new technology to fulfill their requirements. This system should be accessible through anywhere in the company and daily incident, performance and utilization reports should be e-mailed to the managers at a particular time. This project dissertation describes technology adopted; approach to solve the identified issues, analysis and design, implementation, evaluation and .testing, and conclusion of the newly developed Decision Support System for Container Handling System. Having implemented this software solution, it was able to get history data, online data and the predictable data within a short period of time. Thus it saves considerable man hours which IT department spends to get those data. Also, unnecessary data redundant is now reduced. Since it is not difficult to find and monitor required information of the container operation. Getting information is now fast and reliable.