A Novel Method of Island Port'S Transport: Automatic Guided Vehicle Approach

The Shanghai Yangshan Port, which is an island port with limited area, is only connected to the Shanghai's inland by Donghai Bridge whose condition cannot lay railways trucks. Meanwhile, empty-load backhaul and empty container balancing waste amount of transport resources. All these limit the port's future development and overall transport efficiency. This paper proposed a novel method that used the electric AGVs fleet to transport containers between island port and inland port (Luchao port), and reduced the empty-load transportation by using one AGV to carry an empty-load AGV. Hence, the inland port could be served as the second yard and the sea-rail intermodal hub of the Yangshan Port to promote the sea-rail combined transportation and expand the port's hinterland area. Then, exhaust emission, energy consumption and cost were analyzed. The results showed that using AGVs can reduce 50% of the total energy cost and 87% of the total CO2 emissions. Meanwhile, an AGV's total monthly costs were equivalent to a container truck when transporting 10 containers per day.