Container terminals are struggling with ever increasing throughput, and are therefore searching for solutions to increase throughput capacity without expanding their physical footprint. At the same time, they target to increase their productivity to be able to handle bigger ships with larger call sizes in the same time windows. Terminal operating systems (TOS) are playing a major role in today’s terminal operations, as they support planning, scheduling and equipment control. More and more tasks are being performed by the TOS – stowage planning, grounding decisions, equipment dispatching – and therefore, they need to be well tuned to the operation, which remains a terminal specific characteristic. In this paper a method is presented to test and tweak the TOS, and train operators on a virtual terminal. It has been successfully applied on the software replacement project at ECT, for a new TOS development in Hong Kong, for a new terminal in Norfolk, UK, and is running in pilot form at APM’s terminal in Aarhus, Denmark…
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