A simulation approach to estimate the value of information in maritime supply chains

With the rapid increase in global trade and introduction of new security measures, maritime supply chain costs have increased and so has the need for business intelligence in improving maritime shipping operations. We develop a seaport operations model that simulates the decision making process associated with scheduling and processing of ships with the objective of evaluating the value of Geographical Information System (GIS) information. We consider two scenarios: (1) A traditional model where there is no GIS information on future ship arrivals; and (2) An information-rich model in which the arrival time of the next ship is known. We propose look-ahead based heuristics for the resulting optimization problems, determine the value of information (VOI), and tabulate how VOI varies as a function of the various operational parameters. Adding such operational intelligence to shipping operations improves the performance by as much as 60% (and by 15% on average) and reduces the costs without expanding the physical footprint of the seaport.