The New Jersey Institute of Technology's
Electronic Theses & Dissertations Project

Title:	Container arrivals forecasting practice and experience at marine terminals
Author:	Sideris, Alexios C.
View Online:	njit-etd1999-094 (xii, 84 pages ~ 5.0 MB pdf)
Department:	Executive Committee for the Interdisciplinary Program in Transportation
Degree:	Master of Science
Program:	Transportation
Document Type:	Thesis
Advisory Committee:	Spasovic, Lazar (Committee chair) Bladikas, Athanassios K. (Committee member) Chao, Xiuli (Committee member)
Date:	1999-01
Keywords:	Containerization. Marine terminals.. Shipping.
Availability:	Unrestricted
Abstract:	The advent of the container traffic in maritime transportation has led during its 40-year long history to novel perceptions and operation planning requirements for the port container terminal. A major requirement in this respect refers to the efficiency of the operations in the container transfer between the different modes. The current study presents a methodology on the development of a forecasting tool to access the service demand patterns at a marine terminal on per day basis. A set of forecasting models was introduced and their implementation difficulties were explored. The main effort in this approach was to replicate the distribution of container arrivals/pick-ups before and after the scheduled voyage date of a vessel. A data-driven decision support system was developed to retrieve and to analyze the historic information captured at a major terminal of the U.S. East Coast for a period of 18-months. The evaluation of the current solution revealed a satisfactory fit of the forecasting model projections to the actually observed patterns. Due to the lack of a solid theoretical background, the approach is unfavorable to the use of applied statistical tests. In general the product should be seen as a management information system designed to assist the terminal activity planning and equipment management in conjunction with the coherent experience of the operating team.