A maritime security framework for fighting piracy

The number of piracy attacks in the Strait of Malacca is significantly reduced from 112 in 2000 to 2 in 2009. While people are celebrating the success of anti-piracy operations applied in the Strait, the number of piracy attacks in the Somalia region increased to its peak. According to the IMO, there were a total of 406 piracy attacks reported worldwide in 2009 and Somali pirates accounted for 217 attacks. There is a total of 1052 crew taken hostage with 68 injured and eight were killed. Since the attacks were well organized and sophisticated weapons such as RPGs were used, it caught the eyes of the world in the news headlines. This paper studies the successful factors as well as the deficiencies in the anti-piracy operations as applied in the two cases and provides an anti-piracy framework for combating piracy to improve maritime security in the high sea

Heterogeneous truck routing policies with tour routing time restriction

We study a heterogeneous full-truckload vehicle routing problem based on the case of a trucking company in Malaysia, where trucks originate from a depot and are dispatched to various parts of the service area. Each order defines an origin-destination pair for pickup and delivery locations. Goods have to be picked up or delivered within the pre-specified pickup and delivery time windows. Besides, we consider a restriction on tour routing time, i.e. the total time taken from the time each truck leaves the depot, servicing a number of orders, to the time it returns to the depot. Our objective is to minimize total deadhead costs. Four integer programming solution policies are proposed. Three of the policies identify the set of homebound trucks before assigning jobs to trucks, while the last policy is a one-off algorithm that assigns job routes to all the trucks and makes sure that each truck will not exceed the total route time limit when it returns to the depot. Crosssectional computation results show that the one-off policy is the best amongst the four. Cumulative analysis results show that all four policies do better than the company’s original assignment in terms of deadhead costs and truck utilization

Port productivity analysis by using DEA: A case study in Malaysia

Recent trends in containerized trade have led to the importance of measuring the performance of container ports. In Malaysia, container ports are mostly situated along the Straits of Malacca, one of the most important shipping lanes in the world. Two of its ports, Port Klang and Port of Tanjung Pelepas (PTP) are ranked amongst the top 20 container ports in the world. In particular, PTP is ranked 16 in 2004, even though it is just a young port which started its operations in October 1999. This paper aims to quantitatively measure the productivity of Malaysian container ports. A cross-sectional performance measurement is carried out, using a DEA approach. To further assess the productivity of the ports over time, a set of panel data is analyzed. In order to compare the productivity of the Malaysian ports with world standards, Port of Singapore is added as a reference