A Study on the Gap between Theoretical and Actual Ship Waiting Ratio of Container Terminals : The Case of a Terminal in Busan New Port

The number of ships serviced at the container terminals in Busan is increasing by 2.9% per year. In spite of the increase in calling ships, there are no official records of waiting rate by the port authority. This study attempts to compare the theoretical ship waiting ratio and actual ship waiting ratio. The actual ship waiting ratio of container terminals is acquired from the 2014 to 2016 data of PORT-MIS and Terminal Operating System (TOS). Furthermore, methods and procedures to measure the actual ship's waiting rate of container terminal are proposed for ongoing measurement. In drawing the theoretical ship waiting ratio, the queuing theory is applied after deploying the ship arrival probability distribution and ship service probability distribution by the Chi Square method. As a result, the total number of ships waiting in a terminal for three years was 587, the average monthly service time and the average waiting time was 13.8 hours and 17.1 hours, respectively, and the monthly number of waiting ships was 16.3. Meanwhile, according to the queuing theory with multi servers, the ship waiting ratio is 31.1% on a 70% berth occupancy ratio. The reason behind the huge gap is the congested sailing in the peak days of the week, such as Sunday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. In addition, the number of waiting ships recorded on Sundays was twice as much as the average number of waiting ships.