The Modelling Support to Maritime Terminals Sea Operation: The Case Study of Port of Messina

The maritime freight and passengers traffic is ever more increasing and the estimation of the sea-side port capacity is an strategic factor to guarantee a high level of ship services quality by means of the optimisation of layout and the improvement of quay services in terms of better time distribution of arrival and departure of ships in port. In the past the authors developed a synthetic combinatorial model capable to analyse sea-side port operation, characterised by the overlap of many different ships traffic, and to evaluate the limit of their capacity as number of ships movement. In the present research the authors have developed a sea-side operation simulation model, based on a flexible and powerful general-purpose platform, structured for capacity estimation and traffic analysis and capable to support both design and operational planning process and to relate the terminal utilisation degree with the quality of the concerned transport services. The paper describes the model and its performances in the case study of the port of Messina, which represents a nervous centre of Italian economy by joining Sicily with the rest of country and allowing a considerable daily exchange of freight and persons, with the daily experience of port congestion.