A System Dynamics Decision Cockpit For A Container Terminal: The Case Of Voltri Terminal Europe

The drastic changes in market features imposed in the last decades by market globalization and production delocalization, have determined the need for ports to quickly react to market change in order to capture and manage the increasing quantity of global freight. But because of the highly dynamic and stochastic context, ports have to adjust in real time their planning of work in the most efficient way. For instance, a ship’s delay or a truck’s strike can modify the operative scenario, consequently imposing to rescheduling the container terminal activities. In this context the system dynamics paradigm can usefully help in efficiently modeling the port activities in order to take the right decisions under different scenarios. More specifically the system dynamics model can be efficiently integrated with an ERP system in order to receive real time data, and then, through a suitable decision cockpit– which allows an easy management of huge amount of dynamic data - created with the system dynamics, carry out real time what-if analysis and then make the most appropriate decisions for a particular port context. The paper presents the case of Voltri Terminal Europe, one of the biggest container terminal in the Mediterranean area. In particular the goal of the paper is to model, through the system dynamics approach, the functioning of VTE and to helps its management through an efficient decision cockpit, connected with an ERP system.