Search

Seaports are multifunctional socio-economic spaces that provide a wide range of services and serve a wide range of customers including shippers, forwarders, logistics operators and transport companies. One of their main tasks is to facilitate the domestic and international trade of goods. The paper attempts to highlight the major role that ports have in the transport system together with the minimization of the transport costs. Ports provide a crucial interface between land and sea. Ports, as integrated logistics centers and multifunctional socio-economic spaces, are key components of the European and global transport system. They also cover transport, logistics, distribution and space functions that influence the city development. Port improvement plays a major role in reducing the transport costs. In order to reduce transport costs, we need to identify the necessary changes to the system (additional berths, reducing the service time by upgrading the operating facilities etc.) to reduce the penalties. Most often, in order to minimize costs, the economic function (sum of waiting costs) have to be optimized. A useful tool for approaching port optimization problems is provided by the theory of queuing: ships can be regarded as "customers", while the "service stations" can be represented by the berths of a seaport. In the case of transit storage, the transfer of goods between sea and land transport is not a single-stage process. In these circumstances the optimum number of berths should be replaced by the optimum number of cranes and the optimum area for transit storage. However, in the hypothetical case study from the paper we will consider the case of a single-stage and single-channel facility (one berth) in order to reduce the queuing time. The main conclusion from the analysis is that the expected queuing time may be reduced either by increasing the handling speed or by making ships more homogeneous (by specializing in serving a particular type of ship or cargo).

The urban transport models are used in the development of Sustainable Urban Mobility Plans. These models are designed to reproduce the actual traffic flow on transport network infrastructure and to test and evaluate the solutions that will lead to a sustainable mobility. One of these solutions is represented by the development of park and ride facilities, for users that are coming from extra urban area. The authors propose in the paper an algorithm for traffic allocation when are developed park and ride facilities. The initial data are obtained from a classic four steps model and are processed to evaluate the degree of demand of transport network when a multi-stage phased scenario is pursued. The results obtained with the proposed method are useful for local and regional decision makers to conceive a strategy to develop new park and ride facilities as well as to obtain a series of quantifiable results for transport network users.