Performance improvement of maritime container terminals through the bottleneck mitigation cycle

Abstract

Scarcity of maritime container terminal (MCT) capacity can become a problem for global supply chains. Bottlenecks limit the capacity of these terminals and should therefore be alleviated. However, there is no structured approach available in current literature to mitigate the effects of bottlenecks at MCTs. Therefore, this research introduces a holistic approach called the bottleneck mitigation cycle (BMC) which consists of three steps: bottleneck classification, bottleneck detection, and bottleneck alleviation. This research aims to provide a proof of concept of this approach.