Ports and Terminals: How the System Works

A ship that leaves Rotterdam for Singapore touches two ports, and almost everything that costs money or time happens at those two ends, not on the 8,300 nautical miles of open sea between them. The sea leg is fuel and watchkeeping; the port call is pilots, tugs, berth windows, cranes, dues, agency, customs, and the queue. A modern container ship can burn through a week of margin sitting at anchor waiting for a berth, and a bulk carrier can lose a fixture’s profit to a slow grab discharge. This article is the hub for the ports, terminals, and coastal-engineering cluster: it explains the port system end to end, from what a port actually is down to the berth a single ship lies against, and then routes you to the five deep-dive cluster hubs that carry the detail. The port disbursement calculator totals what a call costs, and the port turnaround time calculator frames the time side of the same call.

The logic of the cluster is worth stating once. A port is a place built to transfer cargo between sea and land, and every part of it exists to make that transfer faster, cheaper, or safer. The questions that recur at every level are the same: how deep, how long, how fast, how much. How deep can a ship load before it touches bottom in the channel; how long a ship fits the berth; how fast the cranes or pumps move the cargo; how much the call costs in dues and services. Hold those four questions and the whole system reads as one machine. The five sub-cluster hubs take the machine apart: container and bulk terminals for the cargo-handling face, berthing operations and fender selection for the moment of contact, canals and straits for the chokepoints that route the ships, port dues and disbursements for the money, and world port profiles for the individual ports themselves.

Port, terminal, berth: the three nested units

The three words get used loosely in trade, but the distinction is exact and it matters for any operational or commercial question. A port is the whole place: the harbor water, the approach channel dredged in from the sea, the breakwaters that shelter it, the basins, and every terminal and berth inside it, all under one harbor authority that controls movement and safety. The Port of Rotterdam, the Port of Singapore, the Port of Los Angeles: each is a single administrative and geographic entity that contains many separate facilities.

A terminal is one specialized facility inside the port, built and equipped for a single cargo type or trade. A container terminal has quay cranes, a stacking yard, and gate lanes for trucks. An oil terminal has a jetty, loading arms, and tank-farm connections. A dry-bulk terminal has grab cranes or conveyors and open or covered storage. A cruise terminal has passenger gangways and a check-in hall. One port commonly runs five or ten terminals, each operated by a different company, each handling its own trade. The terminal is the unit of competition and investment; operators bid for terminals, not for ports.

A berth is the smallest unit: one position where one ship lies alongside to work, defined by a length of quay and a depth of water alongside it. A container terminal might have four berths along a continuous 1,400-meter quay; a bulk terminal might have a single berth at the end of a jetty. The berth is what a ship is actually assigned to on arrival, and the berth’s two governing numbers, the length and the depth alongside, decide whether a given ship can use it at all. The nesting is clean: a port contains terminals, and a terminal contains berths. When a fixture specifies a “safe port” or a “safe berth,” it is invoking exactly these levels, because the warranty of safety attaches to the named place, and the world port profiles hub records the specific berths, depths, and restrictions port by port.

The terminal types worth holding apart are the ones built around fundamentally different cargo. A container terminal handles boxes on a continuous quay with rail-mounted ship-to-shore cranes and a paved yard stacked by gantry or straddle. A dry-bulk terminal handles homogeneous loose cargo (iron ore, coal, grain, bauxite) with grab cranes, continuous ship unloaders, or shore conveyors, and stores it in open stockpiles or silos. A liquid-bulk terminal handles crude, products, chemicals, or liquefied gas through loading arms or hoses into a tank farm, usually at a jetty rather than a quay. A ro-ro terminal handles wheeled cargo (cars, trailers, project units) driven on and off over a stern or side ramp, so the berth needs a linkspan, not a crane. A general-cargo or breakbulk terminal handles non-containerized lots with quayside mobile harbor cranes. A cruise terminal handles people, with gangways and a terminal building rather than any cargo gear at all. The cargo dictates the equipment, the equipment dictates the layout, and the layout dictates which ship can call, which is why a tanker cannot use a container berth and a car carrier cannot use a grain berth.

The port call, step by step

A port call is a sequence, and each step has its own actors, its own cost, and its own failure modes. The sequence below is the common shape; the order is stable even though the detail varies between a container terminal in Singapore and a bulk berth on a tidal river in the United Kingdom.

1. Pre-arrival: the master sends the ETA and the ISPS, health, and manifest notifications through the agent, and VTS slots the ship, holding it at anchor until a berth and tidal window are free.
2. Pilotage: a licensed pilot boards 2 to 6 nautical miles off the entrance and takes the conduct of the navigation.
3. Towage: tugs make fast and the pilot conducts the ship into the harbor against the wind and current.
4. Berthing: the ship comes alongside at a controlled approach speed, the fenders absorb the energy, moorings go out, and the ship is declared all fast.
5. Cargo operations: once the gangway, shore connections, and surveys are done, the cranes or pumps run the load or discharge.
6. Departure: documents settled, moorings come in, tugs assist the unberthing, the pilot disembarks at the pilot station, and the ship sails.

The call begins before the ship arrives. The master sends an estimated time of arrival and the pre-arrival notifications the port requires: the ISPS security declaration, the maritime declaration of health, the cargo and dangerous-goods manifests, and the request for services through the agent. Vessel traffic services (VTS), the port’s radar-and-radio control, slots the ship into the traffic pattern and may hold it at anchor or drifting off the pilot station until a berth and a tidal window are free. The VTS and the channel’s aids to navigation (the buoys, beacons, and leading lights that mark the approach) follow the standards set by IALA, the International Association of Marine Aids to Navigation and Lighthouse Authorities. Waiting time here is pure cost, and it is the single biggest swing in a call’s economics; the estimated time of arrival to pilot station calculator plans the approach against the tidal and berth windows.

Pilotage comes next. A licensed pilot, who knows the local channel, the tides, the traffic, and the berth, boards the ship from a pilot boat 2 to 6 nautical miles off the entrance and takes the conduct of the navigation while the master keeps command. Pilotage is compulsory in most commercial ports for ships above a size threshold, and the pilot’s local knowledge is the legal and practical reason: a deep-draft ship in a dredged channel has very little water under the keel and no room to recover from an error. The transfer itself is a hazard, conducted by pilot ladder up the ship’s side, governed by SOLAS regulation V/23 and IMO resolution A.1045(27) on pilot transfer arrangements.

Towage follows or overlaps. Tugs make fast forward and aft, or stand by on a line, to control the ship through the harbor and against the berth. The number and power of tugs is set by the ship’s size, the wind and current, and the geometry of the approach; a laden very large crude carrier berthing in a beam wind can need four to six tugs, while a feeder container ship in calm water needs none. Tug capability is rated in bollard pull, the static pull the tug can exert, and matching tug bollard pull to the ship and conditions is a defined calculation, run by the tug bollard pull selection calculator.

Berthing is the moment of contact, and it is an engineering event in its own right. The ship is brought alongside at a controlled transverse velocity, typically 0.08 to 0.15 meters per second for a large tanker at a sheltered berth, and the fender system absorbs the kinetic energy of the approach. Get the approach speed or the fender wrong and the result is a dented hull or a damaged berth. The full method, the PIANC kinetic-energy formula and the fender selection that follows from it, is the subject of the berthing operations and fender selection hub, with the PIANC berthing energy calculator behind it. Moorings go out as the ship comes to rest, and the ship is declared all fast.

Cargo operations are the reason the ship came. Once the gangway is rigged, the shore connections are made, and the load or discharge plan is agreed, the cranes start or the pumps run. This is where the terminal’s productivity decides the call length: a container terminal’s crane moves per hour, a bulk terminal’s tonnes per hour, a tanker terminal’s cubic meters per hour. The cargo work is treated in full in the container and bulk terminals hub, because the handling rate is the heart of what a terminal sells.

Departure reverses the arrival. The cargo is complete, the documents (the bill of lading, the cargo manifest, the customs clearance) are settled, the moorings come in, tugs assist the unberthing, the pilot conducts the ship back to the pilot station and disembarks, and the ship is at sea. Through every step the local agent acts for the ship: ordering the pilot and tugs, arranging the berth, clearing customs and immigration, supplying stores and fresh water, and fronting and settling every charge, which is the subject of the next two sections and of the port dues and disbursements hub.

The time the whole sequence takes is the port turnaround, and it splits into productive and unproductive parts. Take a panamax bulk carrier discharging 70,000 tonnes of coal at a grab-crane berth that works 18,000 tonnes a day: the cargo work alone runs about four days, but the call also carries the anchorage wait for a berth, the pilotage and towage in and out, the survey and document time before and after cargo, and any weather or tide stoppage. A berth that the ship reaches with no anchorage wait might turn the call in five days; the same ship at a congested port can wait a week at anchor before it ever gets the pilot. The difference between those two outcomes is the largest single variable in the call’s economics, because anchorage waiting earns nothing and, under a voyage charter, the laytime and demurrage account turns on exactly when the notice of readiness was tendered and how much of the wait counts against the charterer. The productive part is set by the terminal’s handling rate; the unproductive part is set by congestion and the tidal window, and the port turnaround time calculator separates the two so an operator can see where the days actually go.

How ports are measured and compared

A port is compared on two distinct axes: how much it moves (throughput) and what it can physically handle (capability). The two are related but not the same, and confusing them leads to bad decisions about where a ship can go.

Throughput

Container ports are ranked by annual throughput in TEU, the twenty-foot equivalent unit, which counts a standard twenty-foot box as one and a forty-foot box as two. The TEU is a volume-of-trade measure, not a weight measure, and it is the universal currency of container-port comparison. The ranking is dominated by Asia: Shanghai handled 51.5 million TEU in 2024, becoming the first port to pass 50 million in a single year, per the Shanghai International Port Group; Singapore handled 41.1 million TEU the same year as the world’s largest transshipment hub, per the Maritime and Port Authority of Singapore; and Ningbo-Zhoushan handled 39.3 million TEU, per the port authority’s own throughput report. Global container throughput reached about 920 million TEU in 2024, per UNCTAD’s Review of Maritime Transport. A transshipment count needs care, because a box that lands at Singapore and is reloaded onto another ship is counted on both moves, so a hub port’s TEU figure overstates the cargo originating or ending there.

Bulk and general-cargo ports are measured in tonnes of cargo handled, because there is no box to count. A dry-bulk port reports tonnes of iron ore or coal or grain; a liquid-bulk port reports tonnes or cubic meters of crude and products. The largest cargo ports by tonnage are the Chinese and Australian bulk gateways, not the container hubs, because a single capesize bulk carrier moves around 180,000 tonnes in one call. UNCTAD’s annual Review of Maritime Transport is the primary source that compiles both the container and the tonnage figures on a consistent basis across years.

Physical capability

Capability is set by a short list of physical limits, and a ship that exceeds any one of them cannot use the berth regardless of throughput. The maximum draft alongside is how deep a ship can be loaded before it touches the channel or berth bottom; it is the binding constraint for laden bulk carriers and tankers, and it changes with the tide. The under-keel clearance, the water between the keel and the bottom, must stay above a safety margin that allows for squat (the ship’s bodily sinkage at speed) and for the seabed’s character, and the under-keel clearance calculator and the squat calculator compute exactly this margin. The berth length sets the longest ship that fits. The air draft, the height above the waterline, sets whether the ship passes under a bridge across the approach.

For container terminals one more capability number governs: the quay crane outreach, the number of container rows across a ship the crane’s boom can reach. A ship-to-shore crane that reaches 24 rows can work the widest container ships afloat; an older crane reaching 13 or 16 rows cannot, and the ship either skips the port or works slowly with a height and reach penalty. Outreach, lift height, and twin- or tandem-lift capability are what a container terminal advertises, and they sit in the container and bulk terminals hub.

Connectivity

Beyond the physical numbers, a port is measured on how well it connects into the global liner network. UNCTAD publishes the Liner Shipping Connectivity Index (LSCI), which scores ports and countries on the number of services, the deployed capacity, the ship sizes, the number of companies, and the direct connections. A high LSCI means a shipper can reach more destinations with fewer transshipments and shorter waits, which is itself a commercial advantage independent of any single physical number. The index is why a port invests in deeper berths and bigger cranes: capability attracts the larger ships and the direct services that lift the connectivity score, which attracts more cargo.

The table separates the two axes deliberately. The throughput rows say how busy a port is; the capability rows say what it can take. A port can rank high on throughput and still turn away a specific ship that exceeds its draft, and a deep new terminal can sit underused if no liner service calls there.

Port governance and the landlord model

Who owns and runs a port decides how it invests, prices, and competes. The World Bank Port Reform Toolkit, the standard reference on the question, sets out a spectrum from the fully public service port, where the authority owns everything and does the cargo handling itself, to the fully private port, where a single company owns the land and runs the operation. Most large and medium commercial ports sit on the landlord model in the middle, and the reason is a division of labor that has held up across decades.

Under the landlord model the public port authority owns the land, the water, the breakwaters, the channels, and the basic infrastructure, and it leases the terminals to private operating companies under long concession agreements, commonly 20 to 40 years. The authority plans the port, controls navigation through VTS and pilotage, dredges and maintains the channel, sets and collects the port dues, and acts as the regulator. The terminal operator builds the cranes and sheds on the leased ground, hires and manages the labor, and runs the cargo handling as a commercial business, paying the authority a rent that usually scales with the size of the facility and the investment the authority has made. The split puts the patient, capital-heavy, monopoly-prone assets (the land and the channel) in public hands and the contestable, service-driven business (the cargo handling) in private hands.

This structure is why a single port can host competing operators. The Port of Rotterdam Authority leases ground to several container operators who compete on price and productivity, while the authority itself never lifts a box. It is also why terminal concessions are valuable and contested: global terminal operators bid for 30-year concessions because the lease, not the land, is the asset they can build a business on. The governance arrangement feeds directly into the charges, because the dues the authority levies and the terminal handling charges the operator levies are two separate bills with two separate owners, a distinction that matters when reading a disbursement account.

Charges, agency, and the disbursement account

A port call generates a stack of charges from several different parties, and the agent assembles them into one account. The charges fall into recognizable groups. Port dues are levied by the authority for the use of the port and its infrastructure, usually assessed on the ship’s tonnage (gross tonnage or net tonnage) and sometimes on cargo. Pilotage is charged by the pilot organization, generally on tonnage and distance. Towage is charged by the tug company per tug per movement, scaled by bollard pull and time. The terminal handling charge is the operator’s bill for working the cargo, per box or per tonne. On top sit the agency fee, customs and immigration charges, light dues, mooring-boat hire, fresh water, garbage and sludge disposal, and any canal or waterway dues incurred en route. The whole catalog and its arithmetic is the port dues and disbursements hub, with the port disbursement calculator and the port dues calculator behind it.

The agent is the hinge of the system. A ship’s principal, the owner or charterer, appoints a local agent in each port who acts on the ship’s behalf, orders every service, fronts the cash to the authority and the suppliers, and then reconciles it all. Before the ship arrives the agent issues a proforma disbursement account (PDA), an estimate of the call’s total cost that lets the principal budget and remit funds in advance. After the ship sails the agent issues the final disbursement account (FDA), the reconciled actual cost with every receipt, and the difference is settled either way. The PDA-to-FDA spread is where overcharging and surprise costs surface, which is why owners and charterers scrutinize the FDA line by line.

Who ultimately bears the charges depends on the charter party, and this is the bridge to the wider commercial cluster. Under a voyage charter the owner carries the port costs out of the freight, because the owner has quoted a single freight figure that has to absorb them. Under a time or bareboat charter the charterer pays the port costs, because the charterer is directing where the ship trades. The allocation is set out in the charter parties overview hub, and the port costs feed straight into the voyage estimation that an owner or operator runs before fixing, because a call at an expensive port can turn a profitable voyage into a loss. The link the other way, into the trade chain that pays for the cargo movement overall, runs through freight forwarding and incoterms.

Canals and straits: the chokepoints that shape routing

A handful of canals and straits carry a disproportionate share of world trade, and they shape where ships go and what they cost to run. They divide into two kinds: artificial canals, which are cut by engineers and charge a toll, and natural straits, which are narrow passages between landmasses that carry no toll but impose their own limits on draft, traffic, and security.

The Panama Canal connects the Atlantic and the Pacific across the Isthmus of Panama, and it is a lock canal because the route crosses high ground: ships are lifted 26 meters to the level of Gatun Lake and lowered again, through locks at each end. The original locks set the Panamax size that defined ship design for most of the twentieth century. The third set of locks, the Neopanamax locks, opened to commercial traffic on 26 June 2016 after a construction program that began in 2007, and they take ships far larger than the old limit, which reshaped the container trades between Asia and the US East Coast. The Panama Canal Authority (ACP), an autonomous Panamanian government entity, runs the canal and sets the tolls, which are assessed by ship type and capacity; the Panama Canal toll calculator works the toll on the Panama Canal measurement basis.

The Suez Canal connects the Mediterranean and the Red Sea across Egypt, and it has no locks at all. The two seas sit at nearly the same level, so the canal is a sea-level cut, 193.3 kilometers from Port Said to Suez, and a ship steams straight through in convoy. A parallel new lane along part of the canal opened in August 2015, which lets convoys pass each other in that section and shortens transit and waiting time. The Suez Canal Authority, an Egyptian state body, owns and operates the canal and sets the tolls on the Suez Canal Net Tonnage basis; the Suez Canal toll calculator computes the toll on that tonnage. The two canals are the reason a Europe-to-Asia ship goes via Suez and an Asia-to-US-East-Coast ship can choose Panama or Suez, and a closure or a draft restriction at either one reroutes ships around the Cape of Good Hope or Cape Horn at a heavy cost in days and fuel.

The natural straits matter as much. The Strait of Malacca between Malaysia and Indonesia carries the bulk of the Asia-Europe and Asia-Middle East trade and is the world’s busiest, with a controlling depth that sets the Malaccamax ship size. The Strait of Hormuz at the mouth of the Persian Gulf carries a large share of seaborne crude oil. The Strait of Gibraltar, the Bosphorus and Dardanelles, the Danish Straits, and the Strait of Dover each channel a major flow through a narrow gate. Unlike the canals, the straits charge no toll, but they impose traffic-separation schemes, draft limits, and in some cases pilotage and reporting, and they concentrate both commercial and security risk into a few miles of water. The full treatment of the canals and straits, their dimensions, tolls, and the routing decisions they drive, is the canals and straits hub.

The routing choice the chokepoints force is a direct cost comparison, and it is the reason the canals can price the way they do. A canal toll is paid against the days and fuel saved by not going the long way round. When the Suez transit is unavailable or judged too risky, an Asia-to-Europe ship reroutes around the Cape of Good Hope, which adds roughly 3,000 to 3,500 nautical miles to a typical Far East to North Europe voyage and about ten to fourteen days at service speed, with the fuel and charter cost of every one of those days. The canal authority sets its toll knowing the alternative, so a Suez or Panama toll running into hundreds of thousands of dollars for a large ship can still be the cheaper option against the diversion. The same logic prices the value of a port’s location: a hub that sits on a strait or near a canal mouth captures transshipment because it is the natural turning point of the network, which feeds back into the connectivity index and the throughput ranking discussed above.

Coastal and berthing engineering

A port is a built thing, and the engineering that builds it sets what it can do. The discipline is coastal and maritime engineering, and PIANC, the World Association for Waterborne Transport Infrastructure, publishes the working-group guidelines the profession uses. The questions the engineer answers are the same four that run through the rest of this article, expressed in concrete and steel: how deep (the dredged channel and the depth alongside), how long and how strong (the quay and the dolphins), how sheltered (the breakwaters), and how the ship’s energy is absorbed at contact (the fenders).

Dredging creates and maintains the depth. A port that wants to take a deeper ship has to dredge the approach channel and the berth pocket to the required depth plus an under-keel allowance, and then keep dredging as sediment fills it back in. The cost of capital and maintenance dredging is one of the largest items in a port’s budget and one of the binding constraints on how big a ship a port can pursue, because a channel that silts fast is expensive to keep open. The depth a port can offer is therefore an engineering and financial decision as much as a geographic one.

The quay and the dolphins carry the ship’s loads. A continuous quay wall, built of sheet piling, blockwork, or caissons, gives a face a ship can lie against along its whole length, suited to container and general cargo where cranes run on rails along the quay. A jetty on piles with separate breasting and mooring dolphins suits tankers and bulk carriers, where the cargo connection is at one or two points and the ship needs hard points to push against and to moor to, but not a continuous wall. The structural design of the breasting dolphin is driven by the fender reaction force, the load the fender transmits back into the structure when a ship pushes against it, which closes the loop with the berthing-energy calculation.

The breakwaters create the shelter. A port exposed to open-sea swell needs breakwaters, rubble-mound or caisson structures that knock down the wave energy so a ship can lie safely alongside and work cargo. The wave climate inside the basin sets how often a ship has to stop work or leave, and a poorly sheltered berth loses operating days to swell and surge. The fender system then takes the controlled berthing energy at contact and the residual wave and wind energy while the ship is moored, which is the full subject of the berthing operations and fender selection hub, the engineering anchor of this cluster.

Where each cluster goes deeper

This article is the map; the detail lives one level down in five cluster hubs, each with its own deep-dive articles and calculators. Read them in the order a ship meets them.

Canals and straits covers the chokepoints that route the ships before they ever reach a port: the Panama and Suez canals with their tolls and dimensions, and the Malacca, Hormuz, Gibraltar, Bosphorus, and Dover straits with their limits and risks. It is where the routing decision and the canal-toll arithmetic live.

World port profiles covers the individual ports: the specific berths, depths, draft restrictions, tidal windows, and charge structures port by port, the data a master or operator needs to plan a real call. It is the reference layer behind the “safe port” warranty in a charter party.

Container and bulk terminals covers the cargo-handling face: the quay cranes, the yard, the gate, the handling rates, and the terminal economics that decide how long a call takes. It is where the productivity numbers and the terminal handling charges live.

Berthing operations and fender selection covers the moment of contact and the moored condition: the PIANC kinetic-energy method, the fender types and their performance curves, the hull-pressure limits, and the mooring forces. It is the engineering heart of the cluster.

Port dues and disbursements covers the money: the dues, pilotage, towage, terminal handling, and agency charges, and the proforma and final disbursement accounts that assemble them. It is where the cost of a call gets totaled and audited.

Across the wider commercial domain the links run on: into charter parties overview for who bears the port costs, into voyage estimation for how those costs feed the fixture decision, and into freight forwarding and incoterms for the trade chain that pays for the cargo to move at all. The capacity, DWT versus GT calculator is the bridge between the cargo a ship carries and the tonnage the port charges on, and the terminal handling charge calculator frames the operator’s side of the bill.

Limitations

This article is a map of the port-and-terminal system, not a substitute for a specific port’s regulations, tariffs, or pilotage requirements. Every port sets its own dues, its own compulsory-pilotage thresholds, its own tidal and draft restrictions, and its own pre-arrival notification rules, and those change without notice; before planning a real call, confirm the current tariff and restrictions against the port authority’s own published information and the local agent, not against any general description here.

The throughput and capacity figures stated reflect published 2024 data: Shanghai at 51.5 million TEU, Singapore at 41.1 million, Ningbo-Zhoushan at 39.3 million, and global container throughput near 920 million TEU as reported by UNCTAD. These figures are revised annually, and transshipment double-counting means a hub port’s TEU overstates the cargo originating or terminating there; treat the ranking as a measure of activity, not of local trade. The canal facts, the Panama Neopanamax locks opening to commercial traffic on 26 June 2016 and the Suez Canal as a 193.3-kilometer sea-level waterway with no locks, are as published by the two canal authorities; toll structures and draft limits at both canals are adjusted periodically, and a transit should be costed against the authority’s current tariff.

The governance description follows the World Bank Port Reform Toolkit’s landlord model, which is the dominant but not the only arrangement; service ports, tool ports, and fully private ports exist, and a specific port’s structure decides who owns what and who bills for what. None of the linked calculators replaces a full call estimate built on the actual port tariff, the agent’s proforma disbursement account, and the specific ship’s tonnage and cargo. The engineering descriptions give the general principles of dredging, quay and dolphin design, breakwaters, and fendering; the design of any real structure follows the full PIANC and national-code procedures, and the figures here are illustrative of the method, not design values.

See also

• Canals and straits: the Panama and Suez canals and the major straits, with tolls, dimensions, and routing.
• World port profiles: individual ports, their berths, depths, draft restrictions, and charges.
• Container and bulk terminals: the cargo-handling face, crane and yard productivity, and terminal economics.
• Berthing operations and fender selection: the PIANC berthing-energy method, fender types, and mooring forces.
• Port dues and disbursements: port dues, pilotage, towage, agency, and the disbursement account.
• Charter parties overview: which charter family bears the port costs.
• Voyage estimation: how port costs feed the fixture decision.
• Freight forwarding and incoterms: the trade chain that pays for the cargo to move.
• Port disbursement calculator: totals the cost of a port call.
• Port turnaround time calculator: the time side of the same call.
• PIANC berthing energy calculator: the kinetic energy a fender must absorb.
• Tug bollard pull selection calculator: matching tug power to the ship and conditions.
• Under-keel clearance calculator: the water-under-the-keel margin in a dredged channel.
• Squat calculator: the bodily sinkage that eats into under-keel clearance at speed.
• Panama Canal toll calculator: the toll on the Panama Canal measurement basis.
• Suez Canal toll calculator: the toll on the Suez Canal Net Tonnage basis.
• Capacity, DWT versus GT calculator: the bridge between cargo carried and tonnage charged.
• Terminal handling charge calculator: the terminal operator’s side of the bill.