# Resource Capacity Requirement for Multi-Terminal Cooperation in Container Ports
## 1 Introduction
And most importantly, when dealing with multiterminal cooperation, the provision of workload information on the shared resources becomes particularly imperative to allow a fair allocation of workload and utilization of resources. This paper investigates the efficiency gains from multiuser terminal (studies on port cooperation typically focus on the cooperation and competition among nearby ports or terminals belonging to different ports, and hence, the cooperation is conditionally recommended or discouraged [12; 13; 14; 15; 16; 17]) co-operations where a single port entity serves calling vessels from different shipping lines and inbound, outbound and trans-shipment containers arrive at terminals at different rates. While some of these terminals may be operating under a single operator, it is interesting to note that the terminals basically function independently of one another with little coordination among themselves. Port of Singapore at Pasir Panjang is one example. Such governance arrangement is made on premise that interterminal competition with a port promotes port productivity as a whole. However, as competitions among peripheral ports intensify with the advancements in logistical system, the conception of having terminals to work together towards a common good of the port is being put forward. The paper proposes a design process for a system-wide capacity requirement planning when terminals within a port cooperate with one another. The logistics process of a container port can be seen as a typical batch process in production planning as containers arrived vessel-by-vessel. According to [PERSON] [18], among the classical capacity methods (that includes rough-cut capacity planning, finite loading with capacity leveling and finite loading with optimization), capacity requirement planning is the most suitable for batch processes. By providing a detailed technique for ascertaining the feasibility of material plans, capacity requirement planning enables the computation of the utilization of individual resources through resource requirement distributions generated by the container arrival plans and help to generate more realizable operations schedules [19; 20]. The analysis begins by first generating a set of resource profile that represents the specific timing of the projected cumulative workloads at individual resources. The resource profiles form a basis for capacity requirement planning, of which a resource profile simulation is developed to estimate the changes in the workload of resources with container arrivals and handling across the neighboring terminals over time-shifts. This study investigates the capacity requirement for the three representative resources, namely, QCs, storage yards, and gates. Results on key performance indicators such as QC intensity, the TEU (twenty equivalent unit) workload at the yard, and the queue length at the gate are recorded for varying inbound, outbound and trans-shipment container arrival rates, and compared over a range of transferring container volumes across terminals. This study enriches the applications of capacity requirement planning beyond the classical applications of production systems. In its consideration of interferminal cooperation and logistics, the study integrates probability models and discrete-event simulation to generate resource profiles and estimate the capacity requirement resulting from resources sharing. The rest of this study is organized as follows: Section 2 designs the capacity requirement planning for multiterminal operations via simulating resource profiles; Section 3 conducts the simulation experiment; Section 4 draws the management implications from the simulation results; and Section 5 concludes this study.