Criteria for selecting innovative technologies for maritime transhipment facilities

The significant cargo volumes transferred by sea, in combination with the increased technological and operational requirements that international competition imposes, lead to the continuous upgrade of infrastructure and equipment of modern port terminals. Within this framework, a number of new technologies for the transhipment of unitised cargo have been developed and are available in the market. In order to increase the understanding of the potential user of the various transhipment system functionalities, a multi-tier software tool incorporating technical information, visual aids, expert opinions, success and failure cases, best practice from pilot implementations, simulation results and multicriteria decision aids, is currently under development. The context of this paper focuses on the core of the above analysis, which is a set of criteria related to operational and performance aspects of maritime facilities that are taken into consideration in the selection of new transhipment systems.