Modeling and Simulation of the Rail Port Cycle

For the undisputed degree of complexity that characterizes the port system, it certainly belongs to the category of systems of systems. In fact, the functioning of a port is made possible due to the interaction of a certain number of subsystems, which in turn depend on other subsystems. The goal of this paper is to model and simulate, by adopting the System Dynamics methodology, a subsystem of the port context: the rail port cycle. The model has been applied to some important container terminals located in Italy. “What-if” scenarios have been tested with the objective of underlining system bottlenecks.