Economic analysis of ports by artificial intelligence

Abstract

The economical analysis model for coastal projects consists of two interrelated sub-models: 1) Artificial Intelligence to determine the rates and capacity of cargo by considering the economical development of hinterland 2) Monte Carlo to simulate ship arrivals/departures from the quays and to estimate income/expenditure parameters of coastal projects. The net present values of the investments were determined by interrelating the income/expenditures of port activities in simulations with the cargo predictions of artificial intelligence for various economic scenarios. The superiorities of this proposed simulation-intelligence model to other classical investment planning methods were the inclusion of uncertainties in the investment parameters like the change of cargo and costs variables in time, and the determination of project benefit/cost with an improved accuracy when compared to classical feasibility analysis methods.