In the port of Barcelona a system of reservation for the access of the trucks to the container will be introduced terminal



of the Spanish port of call, that it will assign to the haulers windows of timetables for the delivery or the withdrawal of the container with the objective to rationalize and to plan the arrival of the heavy vehicles in the harbour area. The new system will be implemented initially let alone gradually and in flexible way for the access to the terminals for containers BEST and APM Terminals Barcelona, in order then to be spread to the Terminal Port Nou.

Before to approach to a terminal of the port of Barcelona the haulers they will have to carry out a reservation. The users of Portic, the Port Community System of the Catalan port, will be able to make it through their applications, while the other operators will be able free of charge to carry out the reservation through the web. The system will be completely transparent and the haulers will be able to know in real time the previewed time of access to the terminals let alone their availability/operating ability and will be able to control also the state of their reservations.

The new system of reservation will be implemented for phases. Beginning from next the 17 september I use it of the system will be obligatory, but it will not have operating consequences as if the hauler will not carry out the reservation correctly it will receive a notification, but will be attended to the terminal. A second phase previews the effettuazione of an analysis of the information generated from the reservations in order to set up the system in sight of the final phase when it is implemented in definitive way. In the third and last phase, in fact, the terminals will establish a determined operating ability for every time slot; therefore each "temporal window" will have an availability limited in terms of truck number to which the access will be returned possible. This limited availability will be validated by the terminals and could be visualized on-line through the system of reservation.

The Harbour Authority of Barcelona has evidenced that this type of systems already is implemented with success in the ports of all the world, as for example to Felixstowe, Amburgo, Montreal, Dubay and New Orleans, and that such systems allow to answer to some of the challenges deriving from the new trends in the marine field, with the containerized marine transport that more and more are characterized by it use of gigantic container vessels, from the reduction of the marine services as a result of the fusion and concentration of the companies of navigation in alliances, tendencies that determine the concentration in the ports of great volumes of traffic over little hours and that they represent a challenge for the terminals and for the terrestrial transport.