Simulation Model of Container Land Terminals

The simulation as a tool for the design of port and terminals has emerged as an answer for the demand to enhance the quality and reliability of the project results. Very high costs of the project solution implementation and practically total lack of liquidity of transport infrastructure objects always induced the immense commercial risks in the terminal business. Lately these risks have multiplied significantly due to rapid changes on the global and regional markets of transport services. Today, many experts come to see this volatility as an indicator of the next phase in development of the global trade system and the derivative cargo transportation system, specifically the state of temporal saturation. The shift of the global goods volumes from quick and steady growth to relatively small fluctuations around constant values causes quick oscillations in re-distribution of demand over the oversized supply. This new business and economic environment seriously affected the paradigm of transport terminal design and development techniques. The new operational environment of terminals put a request for the designers to arrange the results not in terms of “point”, but in terms of “functions”. Eventually it resulted in development of the modern object-oriented model approach. The wide spread of this approach witnesses the objective demand for this discipline, while in many aspects it remains in the intuitive (pre-paradigmal) phase of its development. The main reason for it is in the problem definition itself, which usually is formulated as the simulation of a given terminal. At the same time, the task is to assess the operational characteristics of the terminal engaged in processing of a given combination of cargo flows. Consequently, it is not the terminal that should be simulated, but the processes of cargo flows handling performed by this terminal under investigation. Another problem that restricts the practical spread of simulation is in the model adequacy. A model which adequacy is not proved has no gnoseological value at all. The paper describes the approach aimed at development of the models with the features discussed above.