Simulation of freight traffic in the Seville inland port

Abstract

The Port of Seville is an inland port located in the Guadalquivir River in the south of Spain and it is the unique Spanish inland port. Our research is focused on the simulation of the freight transport process beginning with the movement through the whole estuary of the river and finishing with the vessels arriving to the port dependencies, where the logistic operators’ load and unload processes take place. The simulation presented in the paper is carried out with Arena software and considers all the types of cargo existing in the Seville Port: containers, cereals, cements, scrap, iron and steel and fertilizers. We have simulated the navigation through the Guadalquivir estuary, the lock, the basins and the docks of the port, as well as the logistic activities in the berths. After testing several scenarios, we can state that the facilities of the Port of Seville allow to deal with the incoming logistic flows, except for momentary difficulties in the container traffic. So the improvement measures for the logistic activity must come from other alternative key actions.