# Resource Capacity Requirement for Multi-Terminal Cooperation in Container Ports
## 4 Managerial Insights
### Analysis on Workload Significance  
In the previous section, the simulation results are obtained under the experimental setting of 80% trans-shipment TEUs and the remaining 20% equally split into inward-bound and outward-bound TEUs. This forms the base model for comparison. Further experimental analysis allows the summation of equal inbound and outbound TEU rates to be determined by the TEU rate for transshipment, i.e., the larger the percentage of trans-shipment TEUs, the lower the aggregate inbound and outbound TEUs. Similarly, the rate for TEU remaining in a terminal is also dependent upon the transferring rate to other terminals since both rates must sum to 1. As before, only trans-shipment TEUs can be transferred, and the other terminals have equal probabilities to take up the transferred TEUs. The purpose of this extended analysis is to understand the effects of the relative volumes of trans-shipment containers against those of the inbound and outbound containers and the volumes of transferring containers across terminals on the capacity requirement. The four levels of the trans-shipment rates (i.e., Upper-90%, Higher-85%, Norm-80%, and Lower-75%) and the two levels of the interterminal container transferring (i.e., Higher-75% and Lower-60%) are simulated. Each combination has a sample of size 200. It means that 200 time-points of vessel departures are randomly selected from the simulation results and the relevant dataset (for the selected 200 time-points) for the QC intensity, the storage space requirement, and the gate congestion is taken. The summarized descriptive statistics are presented in Appendix B. Figure 11a compares the mean QC intensities across the trans-shipment rates and the transferring rates. From the figure, the QC intensity is increased by 4.1% and 12% when transferring rates are at a high and low of 75% and 60%, respectively, when the trans-shipment rate is increased up to 80% from 75%. The increase in QC intensity is logical, as the shortened duration-of-stay of containers at yard increases higher handling request at the quayside. The smaller increment observed under the higher transferring rate is due to the higher support of distributing workload by means of transferring. Further increase to the trans-shipment TEUs rates (for example, 85%) leads to 5.6% and 4.1% reduction of QC intensity under higher and lower transferring rates, respectively. This reduction can be attributed to the possibility of transferring workload to other terminals, which in turn, translates into better chances for a more evenly distributing QC handing workload across terminals. Subsequent increase in the trans-shipment rate to 90% produces an increase of QC intensity by nearly net of 0.9 and 0.3%, respectively. At this level of trans-shipment rate, the workload distribution effect of transferring work is dominated by the even higher handling request for QCs. Another important element concerns the uncertainties in resource requirements. As shown in Figure (b)b, despite having a high level of the trans-shipment rate (i.e., 90%) that provides opportunities to reduce QC intensity through TEUs redistribution across terminals, higher uncertainty in QC intensity requirement is reported when there are active transferring activities among the terminals (i.e., transferring rate at 75%). On the other hand, the lower transferring rate (i.e., 60%) contributes to the monotonic decreases of QC intensity as the trans-shipment rate increases. When the trans-shipment rates are reduced, the corresponding rates for outbound and inbound TUEs increase. This leads to longer expected duration-of-stays for TEUs at the yard and increasing storage space requirement (Figure (a)a). When the transferring TEUs rate to other terminals is lowered from 75% to 60%, the terminal will require a 1.5% higher storage space capacity on average as more space is needed to accommodate containers at the yard. However, as the trans-shipment rate rises up to 90%, the storage space capacity associated with the lower transferring rate (60%) drops by 14.2%.