Modelling Environmental Impact and Efficiency in Maritime Logistics

In recent years, in all countries the awareness on environmental problems is increasing moving forward to the concept of sustainable development. This paper is focusing on the development of simulation models related to the environmental assessment with special attention to port activities; the goal of this simulator is to measure the different Environmental Impacts (EI) and to evaluate alternative strategies and solution for guaranteeing improvements in term of port sustainability, including productivity and costs; in fact it is critical to identify solutions that are effective and competitive and at the same time that reduce EI such as resource consumption, garbage/waste disposals, noise, Ship discharges and spills. In this paper the authors present a model of a port terminal, and support the tailoring of GreenLog Simulator on this applications; this is a simulation engine developed to simulate and evaluate environmental impact in every supply chain element. In order to test the simulation model and analyze different strategies for the port sustainability, the authors propose a simple case study related to the simulation of environmental impacts comparing the emissions of a container ship docked in a port and powered by its own engines to the same ship powered by national electric grid. This experimental example represents an opportunity for additional testing of the simulation applied to green logistics.