Supply chain decarbonisation - a cost-based decision support model in slow steaming maritime operations

CO2 emissions from maritime transport operations represent a substantial part of the total greenhouse gas emission. Vessels are designed with better energy efficiency. Minimizing CO2 emission in maritime operations plays an important role in supply chain decarbonisation. This paper reviews the initiatives on slow steaming operations towards the reduction of carbon emission. It investigates the relationship and impact among slow steaming cost reduction, carbon emission reduction, and shipment delay. A scenario-based cost-driven decision support model is developed to facilitate the selection of the optimal slow steaming options, considering the cost on bunker fuel consumption, available speed, carbon emission, and shipment delay. The incorporation of the social cost of cargo is reviewed and suggested. Additional measures on the effect of vessels sizes, routing, and type of fuels towards decarbonisation are discussed.published_or_final_versio

Schedule Reliability in Liner Shipping: A Study on Global Shipping Lines

Due to the complex structure of the transportation systems, disruptions in transport operations may occur from time to time. In liner shipping, it is seen that shipping lines frequently deviate from the transit times announced in their vessel schedules, and this leads to schedule unreliability. This leads to schedule unreliability and affects all stakeholders. Based on actual transportation data, this study aims to evaluate the transit time reliability performance of shipping lines and the factors that may affect transit time reliability to investigate schedule reliability in liner shipping. To evaluate the transit time reliability of shipping lines’, transit time deviations were calculated based on observations containing 5080 transport data of shipping lines and current performances are discussed. Hypotheses were tested with independent sample t-test and Welch’s ANOVA to examine the factors affecting transit time reliability. Tamhane’s T2 post-hoc test was used to determine the difference between groups. Results show that transit time reliability of shipping lines is low. It has been observed that the type of service, season, vessel age, and TEU capacity of the vessel factors affect the transit time reliabillity. With this study, shipping lines can evaluate their reliability performances according to the competition. At the same time, lines can use these results to understand, evaluate and manage factors that affect their transit time reliability. In this direction, suggestions have been made to the shipping lines to contribute to improving transit time reliability and service quality. This article is regarded to close the gap in evaluating transit time reliability in liner transportation because it relies on actual transportation data

Optimization in container liner shipping

We will give an overview of several decision problem encountered in liner shipping. We will cover problems on the strategic, tactical and operational planning levels as well as problems that can be considered at two planning levels simultaneously. Furthermore, we will shortly discuss some related problems in terminals, geographical bottlenecks for container ships and provide an overview of operations research methods used in liner shipping problems. Thereafter, the decision problems will be illustrated using a case study for six Indonesian ports

Optimising the climate resilience of shipping networks

Climate catastrophes (e.g. hurricane, flooding and heat waves) are generating increasing impact on port operations and hence configuration of shipping networks. This paper formulates the routing problem to optimise the resilience of shipping networks, by taking into account the disruptions due to climate risks to port operations. It first describes a literature review with the emphasis on environmental sustainability, port disruptions due to climate extremes and routing optimisation in shipping operations. Second, a centrality assessment of port cities by a novel multi-centrality-based indicator is implemented. Third, a climate resilience model is developed by incorporating the port disruption days by climate risks into shipping route optimisation. Its main contribution is constructing a novel methodology to connect climate risk indices, centrality assessment, and shipping routing to observe the changes of global shipping network by climate change impacts

The impact of slow steaming on the carriers’ and shippers’ costs: The case of a global logistics network

We propose an analytical modeling methodology for quantifying the impact of slow steaming on the carrier's voyage cost and on the shipper's total landed logistics costs. The developed methodology can be employed by a carrier and a shipper in their contract negotiations, in order for the two parties to determine how they could divide between them the savings resulted from slow steaming. We demonstrate that the impact of slow steaming and speed adjustment policies on the shippers’ total landed logistics costs tend to increase as the vessel travels towards the end of its voyage