Suchergebnisse

In investigating a principal area of a certain African country's total distribution network, viz the cargo handling operations within its main Port, a logistics systems model was used as a basis of the research design to measure the current cargo handling performance. In this article, the reader is taken step‐by‐step through the research method, data collection and analysis, hopefully to demonstrate the practical application of the model and the implications for its further use.

AbstractAnalysis of cyclic‐linked cargo‐handling systems is presented and solved by Monte Carlo techniques for several typical instances.

Cargo handling activities involve various heterogeneous outputs, e.g. general cargo, containers, dry and liquid bulk, and so on. These activities in ports, however, have been usually analysed using aggregate descriptions of output such as total tons moved. The main purpose of this paper is to show that ignoring this heterogeneity may lead to two types of problems: (i) the underestimation of the relevance of key dimensions (i.e. marginal costs per product and economies of scope) and (ii) a bias in the estimates of the relevance of other dimensions (economies of scale). To do so, we rely on a unique new dataset on three cargo handling firms operating in a Spanish port between 1991 and 1999. We use it to estimate both a multi-output cost for these three operators as well as an aggregate cost function. The policy conclusions are derived from an explicit and detailed comparison of these two sets of estimates.