A method for determining the allocation strategy of on-shore power supply from a green container terminal perspective

The main contribution of this paper is to determine the allocation strategy of on-shore power supply (OPS), comprising additional power capacity of OPS and adopting patterns of OPS at berth, to realize the trade-off between total cost of OPS and carbon emissions of ships. Firstly, carbon emission formulations, adopting patterns of OPS and arrival patterns of ships are described. Then, in order to minimize total cost and carbon emissions, an integer programming model for OPS allocation problem is proposed. Next, a simulation-based solution method is developed to resolve the optimization model, which consists of inner simulation module and outer optimization module. The outer module enumerates all the allocation scenarios and evaluates the results from the inner module. The inner module introduces a simulation model to represent the stochastic operation system in the container terminal and outputs results to outer module. Finally, taking a port in China as an example, this paper designs and conducts a series of experiments and discovers that the sensitivity of results emphasizes the importance of electricity price on the optimal allocation. When electricity price is lower or larger than 0.3 $/kWh, the optimal power capacity is 9200 or 5230 kW, correspondingly.