Completion and Scheduled Service-Start Recovery After Equipment Disruption in a Synthetic Intermodal Terminal

Equipment outages can alter task sequences, completion deficits, and planned service-start adherence in an intermodal terminal. We evaluate these distinct outcomes in a synthetic model with empirically informed median movement parameters. Tasks are released 60 min before the planned service start; that plan is not a departure or completion deadline. Each intervention is compared with a no-failure policy switch at the same time after common prehistory. The primary campaign contains one baseline, eight switching controls, and 48 outage-policy scenarios. Under 60 min persistence, 14 of 24 lower-relative-pressure cases show no excess outstanding late-start workload; the remaining cases recover in 98–211 min. All 24 higher-relative-pressure cases recover in 77–221 min. Four qualifying start-recovery episodes later relapse. Moving the monitored boundary from service-bundle assignment to productive handling changes the no-degradation count from 14 to four. Structural and control sensitivities also change comparisons; a 30 min update interval removes excess start backlogs in all six tested outage cases, while completion recovery still takes 166–199 min. Four policy labels represent three distinct behaviors. These results support metric-explicit matched comparisons, not validated departure-service recovery, sustainable capacity, universal rankings, or complete disruption economics.