Developing a sustainable intermodal transportation system to enhance the efficiency of port's activities

Abstract

Transporting millions of containers through the container terminal at the seaport per year while ensuring minimum handling operations cost and emission is challenging for the container terminals. Today, the intermodal container terminal is considered as a hearth for most intermodal transportation systems. The intermodal container terminal in the seaport is a complex system that requires careful planning in order to perform operations efficiently. Thus, inefficiently operating the terminal can slow down the flow of containers to their destination as well as increase the dwell time of the ship in the port, which leads to an increase in the total cost and affects sustainability. Consequently, there is a need for new methodologies and technologies that guarantee enhancements of terminal performance, increase capacity, and mitigate negative impacts on the environment. In a large number of cases, the seaports are usually surrounded by big cities. Hence, improving new layouts for the container terminal will lead to the faster, cheaper, and more efficient transfer of containers from their origin to the destination in a sustainable way. In this study, the Port of Montreal is used as a case study to validate the proposed layout and experiments. In my first article, titled "Developing the Seaport Container Terminal Layout to Enhance Efficiency of the Intermodal Transportation System and Port Operations - Case of the Port of Montreal," we developed a new container terminal layout. An efficient layout of the container terminal can be achieved by reducing the distance and disposition between the quay and rail tracks. We propose a novel layout to reduce the cost and accelerate container flow, thus improving the handling system's effectiveness. We develop a MILP model to estimate and analyze the performance considering the arcs congestion for the current layouts and the new proposed layout. We present a study case on The Port of Montreal to validate the suggested solution. We found that the projected layout reduces the total cost and time for transporting containers from the port to their destination. Despite the advantages of intermodal transportation, it still has undesirable effects connected with congestion and emission. In the second article, titled "Optimization of Container Terminal Layouts in the Seaport - Case of Port of Montreal," the intermodal transportation system and its effect on port efficiency were addressed. The article investigates the role of the proposed layout in minimizing the cost of transport containers from the ship to the final destination and emissions generated from these operations. The proposed layout can improve the sustainability of port activities by decreasing the distance between the berth and interface points as well as avoiding double handling. The model was formulated as multi-objective optimization, and we use the ε-constraint method to solve the problem. The results illustrate that the proposed layout resulted in a considerable reduction in both the total cost of transport containers to their final destination and emission associated with these operations. Since different modes of transportation and resources interact and function together, the system is becoming quite complex to understand its behaviour and predict the effect of changing in some parameters. In this regard, we developed a simulation model in the third paper titled "A Simulation Approach to Compare Different Container Terminal Layouts." A discrete simulation model is developed using the SIMAN simulation language and then implemented through the Arena software application. This study aims to improve the performance and handling capacity of the terminal by recommending a new layout. Computational experiments were conducted to evaluate and compare both layouts' performance using data collected from the Port of Montreal. The results indicate that terminal layout design has a significant impact on terminal performance under the configuration of different transportation modes.

Date	24 May 2021
Original language	American English
Awarding Institution	École de technologie supérieure
Supervisor	Marc Paquet (Supervisor) & Mustapha Ouhimmou (Co-supervisor)