JOURNAL OF NAVIGATION, vol.69, no.4, pp.815-827, 2016 (SCI-Expanded)
Nautical services should be allocated efficiently as they have great resource costs. In this paper, the Marine Pilotage Service in the Istanbul Strait has been analysed by using Rockwell Arena Simulation Software. The purpose of the study is to find the required number of marine pilots for vessel traffic flow in the Istanbul Strait. It is evaluated thoroughly by a stochastic, dynamic, discrete simulation for safe service standards in pilotage. The result of the paper shows that discrete simulation technique is an efficient and reliable way of solving complex techno-nautical service allocation problems as proven by experts. As the discrete simulation result data shows, most other techno-nautical services can also be modelled and optimised by using similar techniques. Areas like optimisation of the number of pilots, tugs, resource allocation problems, berthing area selections and many more complex and inherently stochastic problems can be reliably solved by simulation experiments.