Abstract
This article introduces a meta-model to support naval logistics providers in sizing off-shore transshipment systems for dry-bulk transportation. Due to the analogy between transshipment and production systems, the model proposed here is founded on simulation, which has been successfully used to design production systems for decades. The main strengths of the proposed model versus the traditional approach lie in that: (1) it allows to take into account some dynamic features unmanageable by manual calculations; (2) the time required to test a specific configuration of the system is dramatically reduced from days of cumbersome calculations to few minutes, on behalf of the decision-making process; (3) it solves the optimisation problem the service providers face when they design transshipment systems for very different contexts where experience is helpless.