Simulation study with truck appointment systems

In the last decades container transport increased a lot and so it did in Rotterdam. The pressure at the ECT Delta Terminal became higher and this lead to problems. Together with the fact that truckers arrive mostly in peak hours at the terminal, this leads to congestion at the gate. Due to this congestion, there are quite long waiting times at these peak hours. A truck appointment system is a solution to solve these problems. With a truck appointment system a trucker has to call before he can get service for an appointment. Each time slot has a certain capacity, when the capacity is reached, a trucker will get another time slot. The result of this truck appointment system is that the arrivals of the truckers will be more spread out along the day and that the peaks will be flattened. There are different designs possible for a truck appointment system. In this research two designs will be discussed. We will discuss the advantages and disadvantages of both of them. We will investigate which truck appointment system will give the best situation. For example we will vary the number of appointments per server and investigating the situation when a trucker has multiple appointments per day. Comparing the results of the simulation we will advise the ECT Delta Terminal which truck appointment system has our preference in which setting. In the last decades container transport increased a lot and so it did in Rotterdam. The pressure at the ECT Delta Terminal became higher and this lead to problems. Together with the fact that truckers arrive mostly in peak hours at the terminal, this leads to congestion at the gate. Due to this congestion, there are quite long waiting times at these peak hours. A truck appointment system is a solution to solve these problems. With a truck appointment system a trucker has to call before he can get service for an appointment. Each time slot has a certain capacity, when the capacity is reached, a trucker will get another time slot. The result of this truck appointment system is that the arrivals of the truckers will be more spread out along the day and that the peaks will be flattened. There are different designs possible for a truck appointment system. In this research two designs will be discussed. We will discuss the advantages and disadvantages of both of them. We will investigate which truck appointment system will give the best situation. For example we will vary the number of appointments per server and investigating the situation when a trucker has multiple appointments per day. Comparing the results of the simulation we will advise the ECT Delta Terminal which truck appointment system has our preference in which setting.