Simulation-based investment planning for Humen Port

• We simulate a container terminal with high accuracy.
• We study the effects of crane changes on the level of service.
• Adding gantry cranes will improve the service level of all ships.
• Adding quay cranes will only improve the service level of big ships.
• The proposed economic plan will reduce investment costs by 18.75%.

This paper addresses an investment planning problem for a container terminal in Humen Port using simulation with Arena software. We propose a simulation model considering various types of container ships and cranes, flexible berth allocation and dynamic crane scheduling. We carry out simulation experiments in order to identify a parameter setting that can minimize the total investment cost while maintaining a required service level. The experiment results show that the proposed economic investment plan can reduce the cost compared with the current investment plan.