Simulation Based Design for a Railway Logistics Re-Engineering Project

In the last decades globalization dynamics have determined a continuous increase in freight flows and a growing global competition for the interception of these flows. This had a tremendous impact on the global supply chains configuration especially on ports, which must be able to handle an increasingly quantity of goods and to quickly ship them towards the consumer and production markets. In order to be able to do that, ports needs more and more space and, at the same time, they require an efficient organizational model for effectively manage so a big quantity of cargo. However many ports, being embedded in the city fabric, can't easily enlarge their borders for gaining new space and therefore they are obliged to look for new areas in the hinterland. These inner areas represents an extension of the ports borders and they are managed just as they were part of the maritime domain: for this reason they are called "dry ports". For an effective working of the "port-dry port" system, it is fundamental, among other things, that the related transportation infrastructures are suitable and functional to sustain the current and forecast freight flows. This paper regards the analysis of the railway system that joints Genoa port principal container terminals with an hypothetical dry port set in Alessandria, 90 km far from Genoa, with the objective of studying the possible infrastructural criticalities and suggesting proper solutions. To this aim, a simulation model has been developed and tested. The paper proposes the Discrete Event Simulation utilizing Arena software supported by MySQL Data Base Management System. Experimental design techniques (DOE) and neural networks have been utilized as an effective tool to produce an adequate experimental campaign and to study the response surface obtained.