Reducing Emission Peaks in a Port Terminal through Optimized Truck Arrivals

The reduction of pollutant emissions due to the truck operations in a maritime terminal is the objective of this work. The proposed approach is firstly based on a suitable prediction method developed by the authors and aimed at forecasting the number of trucks reaching the terminal to bring export containers in each day of a specified time interval. Once that the curve of truck arrivals is predicted, an emission model is adopted to evaluate the corresponding pollutant emissions. As a result, it is possible to verify in advance whether at certain days the overall emissions overcome a critical threshold. If this happens, it is needed to redistribute the truck arrivals in order to maintain emissions as close as possible to the threshold. This is optimally done by stating and solving an optimization problem whose solutions are tested in the case study of export flows in the PSA Genova Pra' (PSA GP) terminal.