This paper deals with the importance of port choice and container terminal selection for deep-sea container carriers. The paper focuses on the research question: on what basis do deep-sea container operators select container ports (strategy) and container terminals (financial reasons) in the Hamburg–Le Havre range over others? In answering this research question, three dimensions are addressed in detail: the buying decision characteristics; port choice strategy; and terminal selection. The results show that strategic considerations at company level are important. For port choice the most important criteria from a carrier's perspective are: availability of hinterland connections; reasonable tariffs; and immediacy of consumers (large hinterland). In addition to these criteria, shipping lines attach great value to often neglected factors, such as feeder connectivity, environmental issues and the total portfolio of the port. The study reveals that port selection and terminal selection are not the same with terminal selection criteria mainly depending on: handling speed; handling costs; reliability; and hinterland connections. The analysis also brought forward that the decision making is different per container carrier, per trade and per port type, implying that a one size fits all approach is not relevant.

Purpose: Port performance and port choice have been treated as separate streams of research. This hampers the efforts of ports to anticipate on and respond to possible future changes in port choice by shippers, freight forwarders and carriers. The purpose of this paper is to develop and demonstrate a port performance measurement methodology, extended from the perspective of port choice, which includes hinterland performance and a weighting of attributes from a port choice perspective.Design/methodology/approach: A review of literature is used to extend the scope of port performance indicators. Multi-criteria decision analysis is used to operationalize the context of port choice, presenting a weighted approach using the Best-Worst Method (BWM). An empirical model is built based on an extensive port stakeholder survey.Findings: Transport costs and times along the transport chain are the dominant factors for port competitiveness. Satisfaction, reputation and flexibility criteria are the other important decision criteria. The results also show how the availability of different modal alternatives impact on the position of a port. A ranking of routes for hinterland regions is done.Originality/value: The paper focuses on two extensions of port performance measurement. So far, not all factors that determine port choice have been included in port performance studies. Here, first, factors related to hinterland services are included. Second, a weighting of port performance measures is proposed. The importance of factors is assessed using BWM. The approach is demonstrated empirically for a case of the European contestable hinterland regions, which so far have lacked quantitative analysis.

This paper investigates the problem of inter-terminal movements of containers and vehicles within a port area in order to achieve an integrated and effective transport within the port and towards the hinterland. Containers from different port terminals are first moved to a rail yard and then delivered to the hinterland by rail. To provide insights for stakeholders such as port authority and terminal operators into tactical planning problems, e.g., the coordination between terminals, railway timetable and train sizes, this paper proposes an optimization model describing the movement of containers and various vehicles between and inside terminals. The model aims at improving the container delivery from container terminals to the hinterland considering both railway hinterland transport and terminal handling operations. A network inspired by a real-life port area and its hinterland is used as a test case to test different components, i.e., inter-terminal transport connections, train formation, railway timetable. A rolling horizon framework is used to improve the computation efficiency in large transport demand cases. The result of the optimization helps in identifying the most promising features, namely, that more connections between terminals and a flexible outbound railway timetable could contribute to improving the integrated container transport performance.

The results presented in this article identify the role of costs in the scientific and grey freight terminal handling literature and analyses the handling costs of different terminal sizes. The literature review shows that handling costs only play a marginal role in the scientific research in intermodal rail freight terminals (IRT). This is remarkable given the large role costs occupy in decision-making in freight transport. Furthermore, the used cost levels show a wide range of proposed amounts and terminal sizes or handling technologies are seldom addressed. Finally, many of the scientific papers do not make it clear whether the average transhipment cost or market price is referred to. Next, the analysis of the investment in, and cost structure of, IRTs shows that IRT investments are very capital-intensive leading to relatively high average costs per handling. However, given the cost characteristics of IRTs, the average cost per handling represents the underlying cost structure and are – in this sense – representative. The cost analysis demonstrates that extra-large IRTs actually have the lowest average handling costs, followed by small IRTs.