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.