No abstract available. / Thesis (M.T.R.P.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2008.

The most important issue at a container terminal is to minimize the ship’s turnaround time which is determined by the productivities of quay cranes (QCs). The tandem lift quay cranes have 33% higher productivities than single lift QCs. However, the tandem lift operations bring new challenges to the vehicle dispatching at terminals and this has become a big issue in the application of tandem lift QCs. The vehicle dispatching at terminals is to enhance the QCs’ productivities by coordinating the QCs’ operation schedules and the vehicles’ delivery schedules. The static version of the problem can be formulated as an MILP model and it is a combinational optimization problem. When the type of QC is tandem lift, the problem becomes more complicated because it requires two vehicles side by side under the QC. Thus, the alignments of vehicles have to be considered by coordinating the delivery schedules between vehicles. On the other hand, because the containers are operated alone by the yard cranes, the vehicles could not be grouped and dispatched in pairs all the time. This dissertation investigates the static and dynamic version of the problem and proposes heuristic methods to solve them. For the static version, Local Sequence Cut (LSC) Algorithm is proposed to tighten the search space by eliminating those feasible but undesirable delivery sequences. The time windows within which the containers should be delivered are estimated through solving sub-problems iteratively. Numerical experiments show the capability of the LSC algorithm to find competitive solutions in substantially reduced CPU time. To deal with the dynamic and stochastic working environment at the terminal, the dissertation proposes an on-line dispatching rule to make real-time dispatching decisions without any information of future events. Compared with the longest idle vehicle rule, the proposed priority rule shortens the makespan by 18% and increases the QCs’ average productivities by 15%. The sensitivity analysis stated that the superiority of the priority rule is more evident when the availability of vehicles is not sufficient compared with the frequency of releasing transportation requests.

Container freight is an important component of the transportation system yet there is little understanding about this issue. This research develops an information system to assist transportation engineers and planners understand container freight transportation in the Canadian Prairie Region. The research conducts a transportation systems analysis to provide information about regional transportation, demand, and flow characteristics of container freight. It also designs, develops, and applies a container truck model to provide information about urban container truck traffic activity. The analysis and model reveal issues that should be considered in defining, evaluating, and choosing among alternative options to improve urban container freight transportation. The transportation systems analysis reveals the following issues affecting regional container freight. The Panama Canal expansion has the capability of altering container freight using the mini land bridge between West and East coast ports although the Port of Prince Rupert is emerging as a legitimate option to the Panama Canal. Railroads are developing integrated logistics centres which often involve relocating intermodal terminals and introducing major container generators to a city. Railroads are operating longer container trains and making fewer stops at prairie cities; however, these cities are developing inland ports to attract international freight. This research produces the first urban container truck traffic model to help overcome insufficient data and information in this area. It comprises defining a container truck network, acquiring container truck traffic data, and estimating container truck traffic volumes. The model is applied to the City of Winnipeg although the following issues are expected to be similar in other prairie cities. The research reveals issues regarding the temporal, spatial distribution, and physical characteristics of container trucks. Overall, about 13 percent of articulated trucks carry containers; however, corridors with high articulated truck volumes do not necessarily have high container truck volumes. Weekend articulated truck traffic volumes are nearly one-quarter of weekday volumes whereas Sunday container truck volumes are similar to weekday volumes. Container truck volumes peak during the midday while articulated truck volumes exhibit an a.m. and p.m. peak. The split between tridem and tandem axle semitrailers is 80/20 for container trucks.

Container freight is an important component of the transportation system yet there is little understanding about this issue. This research develops an information system to assist transportation engineers and planners understand container freight transportation in the Canadian Prairie Region. The research conducts a transportation systems analysis to provide information about regional transportation, demand, and flow characteristics of container freight. It also designs, develops, and applies a container truck model to provide information about urban container truck traffic activity. The analysis and model reveal issues that should be considered in defining, evaluating, and choosing among alternative options to improve urban container freight transportation. The transportation systems analysis reveals the following issues affecting regional container freight. The Panama Canal expansion has the capability of altering container freight using the mini land bridge between West and East coast ports although the Port of Prince Rupert is emerging as a legitimate option to the Panama Canal. Railroads are developing integrated logistics centres which often involve relocating intermodal terminals and introducing major container generators to a city. Railroads are operating longer container trains and making fewer stops at prairie cities; however, these cities are developing inland ports to attract international freight. This research produces the first urban container truck traffic model to help overcome insufficient data and information in this area. It comprises defining a container truck network, acquiring container truck traffic data, and estimating container truck traffic volumes. The model is applied to the City of Winnipeg although the following issues are expected to be similar in other prairie cities. The research reveals issues regarding the temporal, spatial distribution, and physical characteristics of container trucks. Overall, about 13 percent of articulated trucks carry containers; however, corridors with high articulated truck volumes do not necessarily have high container truck volumes. Weekend articulated truck traffic volumes are nearly one-quarter of weekday volumes whereas Sunday container truck volumes are similar to weekday volumes. Container truck volumes peak during the midday while articulated truck volumes exhibit an a.m. and p.m. peak. The split between tridem and tandem axle semitrailers is 80/20 for container trucks.

The effectiveness of temporary flood protection is highly variable depending on the location, application, and the nature of flood events. This thesis evaluates sand-filled geotextile containers used as flood protection products within a framework of standardized tests. Specifically, Syn-Tex Wave Breakers and Super Sandbags are tested in both laboratory and field settings to quantify seepage rates, stability and durability. This allows informed decisions to be made regarding appropriate applications for each temporary flood protection product, and identifies areas for product improvement and development. The products tested performed well over the range of loading conditions applied. Large sand-filled geotextiles would be well-suited for situations where stakeholders have a low tolerance for risk, and there is adequate site access for the construction equipment required for installation. An ideal installation would be a long, relatively straight stretch where vertical product/wall and product/product interfaces can be minimized.

Multimodal container terminals are an important part of the logistics systems in international trade. Any improvement in the terminal efficiency is likely to reduce the costs of transporting goods, and to strengthen the trading position of the nation. During the import process, containers flow from ships to the storage yard for temporary storage and then are later moved to the hinterland by rail, or by road. The export process is the reverse of the import process. From the marshalling area, it is possible for a yard machine to carry an inbound container to the storage area and back with an inbound container in one round trip. This thesis investigates the inbound and outbound container process of multimodal container terminals in a multi-ship and multi-berth environment. The aim is to develop mathematical models and analytical tools for yard operation and planning. This study concerns the yardlayout, storage locations, operation strategies as well as the sequencing and scheduling of container process. Several models are developed for the scheduling of container process, taking account of planned and unplanned disruptions, and the intermediate buffer at the marshalling area. The problem is NP-hard and real-life problems often involve large number of containers. In addition, many schedules may not be feasible due to deadlock or violation of precedence-constraints. Good results were achieved on benchmark problems using the proposed innovative. In dealing with unplanned disruptions, reactive scheduling approach was found to give the results similar to as if the disruptions were planned in advance. Numerical investigations are also presented on various factors affecting the efficiency of seaport container terminals including the number of yard machines, and the number of quay crane. As with the various yard-layouts studied, it was found that containers are best stored in rows perpendicular to the quay-line with about 10 to 14 bays in each row. For a shorter ship service time, ideally the containers should be stored as close as possible to the ship. The best storage locations, however, are scarce resources and are not always available. Another model is developed for the best storage location as well as the best schedule for the container process. From an initial best schedule with predefined storage locations, the problem is solved by iterating through the refinement of storage scheme and re-scheduling. At a seaport terminal, ships are planned to arrive and leave within a scheduled time window. Nevertheless, a ship may arrive late due to poor weather conditions or disruptions at the previous port. Such delay may also affect its departure to the subsequent port. To minimise the impact of ship delays, port operators must consider alternate arrangements including re-assignment of berths, re-sequencing of ships and rescheduling of the container process. A ship delay model is developed and the problem is solved by combining branching and Tabu Search. The models developed in this thesis establish the relationship between significant factors and the options for increasing throughput by discovering the bottlenecks. The models are applicable as decision tools for operation planning, yard layout, and cost and benefit analysis for investment in infrastructures.

Thesis (M.S.)--Rochester Institute of Technology, 1991. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 54-56).

Thesis (M.S.)--Oregon State University, 2010. / Printout. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 73-76). Also available on the World Wide Web.

New and innovative technologies to improve the techniques that are already being used are constantly developing. This project was about evaluating if containers could be something for the IT company Tieto to use on their products in telecommunications. Container are portable, standalone, executable lightweight packages of software that also contains all it needs to run the software. Containers are a very hot topic right now and are a fast-growing technology. Tieto wanted an investigation of the technology and it would be carried out with certain requirements where the main requirement was to have a working and executable protocol stack in a container environment. In the investigation, a proof of concept was developed, proof of concept is a realization of a certain method or idea in order to demonstrate its feasibility. The proof of concept led to Tieto wanting additional experiments carried out on containers. The experiments investigated if equal performance could be achieved with containers compared to the method with virtual machine used by Tieto today. The experiment observed a small performance reduction of efficiency, but it also showed benefits such as higher flexibility. Further development of the container method could provide a just as good and equitable solution. The project can therefore be seen as successful whereas the proof of concept developed, and experiments carried out both points to that this new technology will be part of Tieto's product development in the future.

abstract: Virtual machines and containers have steadily improved their performance over time as a result of innovations in their architecture and software ecosystems. Network functions and workloads are increasingly migrating to virtual environments, supported by developments in software defined networking (SDN) and network function virtualization (NFV). Previous performance analyses of virtual systems in this context often ignore significant performance gains that can be acheived with practical modifications to hypervisor and host systems. In this thesis, the network performance of containers and virtual machines are measured with standard network performance tools. The performance of these systems utilizing a standard 3.18.20 Linux kernel is compared to that of a realtime-tuned variant of the same kernel. This thesis motivates improving determinism in virtual systems with modifications to host and guest kernels and thoughtful process isolation. With the system modifications described, the median TCP bandwidth of KVM virtual machines over bridged network interfaces, is increased by 10.8% with a corresponding reduction in standard deviation of 87.6%. Docker containers see a 8.8% improvement in median bandwidth and 4.4% reduction in standard deviation of TCP measurements using similar bridged networking. System tuning also reduces the standard deviation of TCP request/response latency (TCP RR) over bridged interfaces by 86.8% for virtual machines and 97.9% for containers. Hardware devices assigned to virtual systems also see reductions in variance, although not as noteworthy. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Computer Science 2015