Study on the Ship Arrival Pattern of Container Terminals

Container ship arrival pattern had an important effect on throughput capacity of container terminals. There is an urgent need for recognition of the ship arrival pattern of modern container terminal, owing to the change of the composition of both operating routes and arrival ships, which was brought up by the rapid development of Chinas coastal ports container service. This paper statistically analyzes the ship arrival data collected from some domestic container terminals from the view of the number of daily arrival vessels and the inter-arrival time between two ships by using Chi-Square Test. The results prove that the ship arrival pattern of container terminals vary with the constitute of container liner routes, and the number of daily arrival vessels follows either Poisson or normal distribution, and the inter-arrival time follows both negative-exponential and gamma distribution.