Abstract. Over the last decades, a great effort has been done in order to achieve a suitable management of international sea freight trade. The maritime container terminals are intermediate points aimed at exchanging containers within multimodal transport networks. The large number of decision problems brought together in these facilities and the way they are related to each other constitute a challenge for their managers. The goal of this work is to overview the most outstanding logistic processes in maritime container terminals and provide some general guidelines for designing integration approaches.