Planning simulation experiments in problems of studying operational strategies of container terminals
The article describes the problem of the effectiveness of different container stacking strategies, which has been the matter of research in many scientific works. The methods of substantiating the strategies vary from mathematical calculations to practical application. There has been set the task to prove the adequacy of the new container stacking strategy. The application of different strategies for container terminals is found not reliable due to rapid changes of operating conditions and insufficient amount of data that can be collected for the short period of a strategy application. It is proved that the only reliable method that provides the independent proof of the efficiency of container stacking strategies is simulation modelling. Special attention in the studies should be given to planning of the experiments. To compare the strategies it is proposed to use multiple experiments with different parameters of the incoming and outgoing traffic. There is presented a case of comparison of strategies for finding a minimum over the entire stack and stacking containers based on their shelf life. When analyzing the strategies for storing containers it is necessary to determine the optimality criterion, since the attractiveness of a particular strategy will depend on the selected optimized parameter. As a criterion of optimality in the given example, the complexity of the selection of containers is taken, which is determined by the average number of movements required to select one container. It is justified that according to the optimality criterion, the best strategy takes into account the storage periods of containers.