原油接卸港区单线航道避让区选址与规模仿真研究

The critical bottleneck affecting a terminal's oil throughput capacity is shifting from the limited number of berths to the channel connecting the berths to the anchorage area. This is especially true for the terminals with a oneway channel where large oil tankers can navigate through the channel only at high tides. Buffers can be installed at those terminals to significantly improve the one-way channel's capacity. This paper examines the buffer's location and size choices for a crude oil terminal with a one-way channel. A discrete-event simulator in-house was developed using Python to explicitly and model the buffer's location and size choices. The simulator accounts for a sufficient level of realism, including the tidal time windows for large tankers and the daytime operation constraints. Taking the Rizhao Shihua Oil Terminal of the Rizhao Port as the case study, this paper used the simulator to analyze the effects of various buffer locations and sizes on the port capacity and service level under two priority rules. They are the conventional "first come, first served (FCFS)" rule and a value priority (VP) rule that prioritizes the tankers with higher holding values. The results show that the VP rule can improve the terminal's capacity by up to 2.35% compared to the FCFS rule. The capacity increases as the buffer moves from the anchorage side to the dockyard side of the channel. The resulting improvement is up to 7.56%. Moreover, a one-way channel accompanied with a dockyard-side buffer holding one tanker only can attain 91.54% of the capacity of a two-way channel, manifesting the great potential of buffers.