October 2017 - THE UK-VIETNAM LOGISTICS NETWORK

Research Seminar – Wednesday 5th July 2017 – Liverpool Logistics, Offshore & Marine Research Institute (LOOM)

On 5th July 2017, Liverpool John Moores University (LJMU) organised a research seminar as an activity of the Newton Institutional Links project “UK-Vietnam Institutional Link in Digital Innovation for Sustainable Maritime Logistics in Vietnam” to present some of LJMU’s work on port efficiency in collaboration with port partners in Vietnam. The seminar were delivered by Dr. Charly Lersteau and Dr. Iffat Gheyas from LJMU.

Over 20 attendees from academia and industry attended the event.

Titles and abstracts of their talks are detailed below.

Simulation of operations in Vietnamese VIP Greenport

Port authorities need to make a variety of inter-related decisions during daily operations at a container terminal. The goal of this study is to develop a decision support tool that supports the terminal operators of Vietnamese VIP Greenport in decision making processes to minimize the ship turnaround time, the congestions on the roads inside the terminal, the average dwelling time of containers at the storage blocks and maximize the average crane productivity. The study will be carried out in three phases: (a) modelling the current state of the port, (b) Simulating port operation using 3D visualization technology and (c) optimizing the operational process. Most of the existing research focus on a particular operation. The goal of current study is to use an integrated approach for optimizing the operational process at container terminal. This is an ongoing work. In this talk, I will discuss the progress made to date.”

Dr. Iffat Gheyas

Optimising the container stacking process in an Asian port

Stack loading problems arise in many logistics applications such as container terminals, container ships, steel yards or warehouses. We are especially motivated by improving efficiency of container terminals. In this presentation, we aim at loading a sequence of items into a set of stacks subject to constraints. Items are accessed in last-in first-out order using a crane, so any target item at the bottom requires reshuffling of upper items. Then finding a loading strategy reducing the number of crane moves is an important challenge in order to decrease operational costs and delays. We introduce mathematical models and heuristics to solve this problem, and experimental results on random and real-case scenarios.