THE ROLE OF SIMULATION AND OPTIMISATION IN INTERMODAL CONTAINER TERMINALS Luca Maria Gambardella and Andrea E. Rizzoli Istituto Dalle Molle di Studi sull’Intelligenza Artificiale CH 6928, Manno, Lugano, Switzerland E-mail: luca@idsia.ch KEYWORDS Transportation Simulation and Optimisation, Intermodal Container Terminals ABSTRACT A review of how simulation and optimisation techniques have been applied to help and improve the management of intermodal container terminals is presented. The paper does not provide a detailed list of references and of existing software packages, since it would be very hard for such a list to be complete and exhaustive. This paper aims to identify the major problem classes whose instances can be found in the operations of container terminals, then to discover which approaches have been chosen to solve these problems and, finally, understand why a given solution has proven successful and why some problem classes have not deserved the same attention obtained by some other classes. On the basis of this review, some research directions are proposed towards the application of simulation and optimisation tools and techniques to the problem of container terminal management. INTRODUCTION Intermodal terminals are the hubs through which most of world cargo is routed through. Intermodal transport can be viable not only for trans-oceanic shipping, but also for intra-continental transport competing with road-only based shipping. The advantages, in a traffic-congested Europe, are not only economical, but also environmental. For this reason, improving the efficiency and throughput of intermodal terminal is a key factor for success. For the Operations Research practitioner an intermodal terminal is a land of opportunities, as shown in Psaraftis (1998) where the author outlines his approach as an academic to the new role of General Manager of the Piraeus Port Authority. In the paper he highlights the following OR/MS type problems he identifies: scheduling berthing priorities; berth booking by “rendezvous”; allocation of ships to berths and cranes; yard management; route and schedule consolidation of ships. This is evidently not an exhaustive list, we can think of the problem of finding the best ship loading and unloading sequence (Mastrolilli, 2000), but Psaraftis’ list is exemplary since it demonstrates the OR/MS approach to a big and complex problem: hierarchical decomposition in simpler problems. In the following, first we introduce the guideline we have adopted in our approach to the problem of intermodal terminal management, the division of the problem according to the time scale. We then show how available data must drive the modelling process and we explain how the solutions to the different sub- problems (in our example, yard management, resource allocation, ship-loading and unloading) must be integrated to achieve an improvement in the terminal performance. Finally, we suggest simulation as the assessment tool to validate the problem solutions.