Insights into How to Enhance Container Terminal Operations with Digital Twins

Abstract

The years 2021 and 2022 showed that maritime logistics are prone to interruptions. Ports especially turned out to be bottlenecks with long queues of waiting vessels. This leads to the question of whether this can be (at least partly) mitigated by means of better and more flexible terminal operations. Digital Twins have been in use in production and logistics to increase flexibility in operations and to support operational decision-making based on real-time information. However, the true potential of Digital Twins to enhance terminal operations still needs to be further investigated. A Delphi study is conducted to explore the operational pain points, the best practices to counter them, and how these best practices can be supported by Digital Twins. A questionnaire with 16 propositions is developed, and a panel of 17 experts is asked for their degrees of confirmation for each. The results indicate that today’s terminal operations are far from ideal, and leave space for optimisation. The experts see great potential in analysing the past working shift data to identify the reasons for poor terminal performance. Moreover, they agree on the proposed best practices and support the use of emulation for detailed ad hoc simulation studies to improve operational decision-making.