Serious Games for Improving Situational Awareness in Container Terminals

Abstract

Container terminals decouple the long-distance, high volume deep-sea transport from the short-distance, highly fragmented hinterland transport. As around 65 % of general cargo is shipped in containers, these terminals play a very important role in global trade. Planning and aligning the activities in and around container terminals is quite difficult, even more because of frequent disturbances in the seaside and the landside operations within the transportation network. The theory of Situational Awareness (SA) might help to improve the alignment between planning activities and to increase resilience. SA asks, however, for a different way of working and communicating. Awareness and practice sessions are needed to train managers and planners to use the SA concepts. The Dinalog project SALOMO has developed tools and serious games to serve as a training, learning, and "try-out" tool for students and practitioners to gain experience in Situational Awareness, alignment of planning activities, and in dealing with disturbances in and around container terminals. This chapter discusses the Situational Awareness framework, on which the tools and games have been built, as well as first experiences in using these tools and games.

Analyzing the impact of container shipping service reliability on global supply chain pressure: An asymmetric approach

“…This situation can have a positive impact on the whole society by reducing costs. Fifth, the timely arrival of the ship will facilitate the optimization of transport modes, as cargoes arriving by sea transport are transported inland by other modes (Verbraeck, 2016). In general, the timely arrival of ships has significant effects on the global supply chain.…”

Digital Versus Analogue Multiplayer Gaming: Comparing Learning Outcomes

“…Container terminals are often affected by a wide range of disruptions like common equipment failures, sudden demand shocks, weather conditions, conflicts and political unrest or even terrorism [8]. Each of these aspects, described for instance [9,10], can have debilitating ripple effects on the container terminal, causing financial, operational or collateral losses and in rare cases affecting human operator safety [11].…”

Design Considerations for Building a Scalable Digital Version of a Multi-player Educational Board Game for a MOOC in Logistics and Transportation

“…berth location and timing of deep-sea vessels, and the sequence of containers to be (un)loaded, are interrelated, and changes in one plan have a big influence on other plans [14]. Moreover, container terminals are often affected by a wide range of disruptions like common equipment failures, sudden demand shocks, weather conditions, conflicts and political unrest, or even terrorism [6]. Each of the disturbances, disruptions or risks, described for instance in [15,16] can have debilitating ripple effects on the container terminal, causing financial, operational, or collateral losses and in rare cases affecting human operator safety [17].…”

“…As one element of this new course, we redesigned an existing and evaluated board game known as the "Container terminal disruption management game" that was focused on the development of Situational Awareness (SA) in integrated planning of container terminal operations. SA is considered to be a pre-requisite for good decision making [5,6]. The game is built on simulation gaming methods to research and train problem solving capabilities in relation to SA [7,8].…”