Research on probability distribution of container liners’ arrival

The vesselspsila arriving law is generally considered to obey Poisson distribution, and inter-arrival time is used to be considered to accord with negative exponential distribution, which fit general cargo transport mode well. However, it will induce significant error if we apply this law into vesselspsila arrival in container transport mode. Itpsilas because that general cargo transport is constitutionally different from container liner transport in shipping organization and management. The former is a kind of unorganized random behavior in shipping system, while the latter is a kind of organized and scheduled behavior. It can be proved that interfered by the interactions of unpredictable factors, such as subjective pointing of line schedule and the weather etc, arriving law of container vessels fluctuates between random distribution and fixed-length distribution. Based on statistical analysis on shipspsila inter-arrival time at certain container terminal in China, we discovered that its probability distribution obeys second-order Erlang distribution. Our further studies demonstrate that order of Erlang distribution will increase along with the promotion of container vesselspsila density and their punctuality. Theoretically, the order is to approximate infinite taking on fixed-length distribution with interference.