Container terminal design process

Container Terminal Design Process is a set of correlated practices considered during container terminal design, aiming to transfer general business mission into detailed design documents for future construction and operation.

The design process involves both conceptual design and detailed design.

The process starts with its source of funding, which determines the mission and scope of the whole project. Considerable choices are:

American ports require subsidies from the federal government in order to keep up with advances in maritime transportation as well as the capabilities of the inland freight movement. Often, roughly 50% of the costs every year come from federal sources. The American Association of Port Authorities (AAPA) is an association which aims at ensuring and increasing federal funds to American ports.

A few federal bills which provide funding for ports are

State's often have their hands in the pot of funding for ports under their jurisdiction. Departments in the state governing body are responsible for doling out their budgets and when a port is integral in their business, funding is surely to be given to the port. Most often, the State's Department of Transportation (DOT) is the largest state/local financier of public money investments. The DOTs see the ports as key elements in the systems of movement that they are responsible for such as railways and highways.

Investment from private entities is critical to the creation and execution of port activities. American ports are often run by private entities in the sense that day-to-day functions are financed and managed with the primary goal of creating revenue. The municipalities of the terminals are kept up by the Port Authority but the equipment and infrastructure required for operations are under the private entities' power.

With the creation of new ports, often Public-Private Partnerships, otherwise known as 3P, are formed to bring in the upfront capital necessary for someone to take on the financial risk of operating a terminal. Container terminals are no different in this sense from other types of terminals.

Cargo determines the main function, transportation mode and related characters required for the terminal. In container terminal design, the object cargo is intermodal container. Containers are usually classified as 20-foot and 40-foot. 53-foot containers were introduced and used both in the U.S.A. and Canada, mainly for domestic road and rail transport.

Vessel, with its dimension and capacity, determines the required capacity for terminal's input capacity, which involves berth design, water-borne handling equipment selection and requirements for both storage and land-mode capacity.

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