Search results

The Northern Sea Route (NSR) could become viable in the near future. If this happens, it will radically reduce sailing times and distances on routes from Asia to Northern Europe. However, although much has been written about the feasibility of the NSR, about the issues involved and about the possible opening of the route, the views of key stakeholders from companies who would potentially benefit from the route have been little explored. The purpose of this paper is to complement the existing literature on the feasibility of and issues related to the NSR by presenting and discussing the results from in-depth qualitative interviews with nine key stakeholders based in Shanghai and Taiwan who have extensive research, knowledge and practical experience of NSR.

Based on a grounded theory analysis, a total of nine key stakeholders knowledgeable about NSR and the majority with sailing experience of NSR are interviewed, including one government official, two professors, shipping experts in six liner and one bulk shipping companies.

The authors present interviewees’ thoughts regarding the feasibility of NSR at the current time in terms of practicalities, ships, costs, information and wider issues.

These thoughts show that whilst the potential of NSR is huge in theory, in practice the overall perception of it in terms of current feasibility from a company perspective is one of challenges and unknown issues. Shipping companies can benefit from the authors findings when considering the feasibility of NSR as a shipping route. Ultimately, the picture emerges that without one country, probably Russia, taking the lead on the route, it will remain only a theoretical one.

In-depth interviews with grounded theory are used to investigate current and actual thoughts on NSR. This paper highlights correlations and additions to show a fuller picture of current knowledge and adds views from Shanghai and Taiwan.

This study aims to explore and analyzes the risk factors in container shipping and logistics services using a dual perspective. The authors gather data not only from logistics service companies but also from their most important customers.

In this research, the authors used case study methodology (interviews and surveys) to examine risk factors that are related to one another within the interaction between logistics service companies and their customers in the emerging markets of the Mediterranean region (Turkey, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya).

The findings show the most important risk factors and compare them using a dual perspective. Customers identify additional risks and estimate their consequences as wider. Interestingly, oil price change plays a dual role because a price increase could be beneficial to the region; at the same time, however, the competitiveness of shipping would decrease. In both response groups, risk likelihood and risk consequence have a positive and statistically significant correlation.

The findings of the study are limited to one shipping/logistics service company. On a global scale, the company is medium-sized; however, in terms of Northern Europe, it is an important player. Extending its service portfolio to the Mediterranean region is an important step.

In emerging markets, risks go hand in hand with profitability, and companies need to apply extensive risk analysis and mitigation strategies to survive.

The southern Mediterranean region is showing some signs of economy recovery. Efficient, robust supply chains are in demand to support sustainable growth.

Using a case study approach in supply chain risk management in shipping is rather rare; this work is ground-breaking in that it uses dual perspective in the analysis.

Economies of scale drive container ship owners towards ordering larger vessels. Terminals need to ensure a safe (un)loading operation of these vessels, which can only be guaranteed if the mooring equipment is not overloaded (lines, fenders and bollards) and if the motions of the vessel remain below set limits, under external forces. This paper aims to focus on the passing vessel effect as a potential disturbing factor in the Port of Antwerp.

Motion criteria for allowing safe (un)loading of container vessels are established by considering the container handling process and existing international standards (PIANC). A case study simulation is presented where the behaviour of the moored vessel under ship passages is evaluated. Starting from a representative event, the effect of changes in passing speed and distance is discussed.

The study illustrates the influence of passing velocity and distance on the behaviour of the moored vessel, showing that when passing speeds are higher and/or distances lower than the reference event, safety limits are potentially exceeded. Possible mitigating measures, including the use of stiffer mooring lines and/or a change in arrangement, are discussed.

This paper serves as a basis for future research on safety criteria and optimisation of the mooring equipment and configuration to deal with passing vessel effects.

The presented results can be used by ship and terminal designers to gain familiarity with passing vessel effects and adopt suggested best practice.

By restricting the motions of the passing vessels, the focus and general well-being of the crane operator is enhanced, as is the safety of workers.

The paper provides a unique combination of container fleet observation, safety criteria establishment and case study application.

The increase of containership sizes driven by the need to create greater economies of scale seems to be an endless process. Vessels of more than 21,000 TEU are presently on order. The purpose of this paper is to question whether a positive effect still remains at present mega ship sizes and, even if this was the case, whether such presumably small effect would be outweighed by costly operational impacts for the lines and the ports out of the huge ship sizes.

The effect of increasing ship sizes on the three major cost items in container shipping have been investigated by extrapolating founded regression curves, applying respective physical laws and referring lumpsum crewing cost (as the major part of the vessel’s running costs) to various ship sizes.

In this paper, it is shown that further effects of lower slot costs lessen while ships get larger. Hence, a further increase in ship sizes would not significantly reduce transport costs anymore. In contrast, the necessary efforts to prepare the ports for ships of ever-increasing size are growing over proportionally with every additional metre of draught and/or beam. It is shown that an ongoing increase of containership sizes, e.g. in the Europe-Far East trade, does not bring any further benefit, neither for the ports and their terminals nor even for the lines itself and not even for the shippers! It is an amazing mechanism that all stakeholders act rationally on their own, but the overall effect for all of them (including the public) has turned into negative.

The results may pave the way for a closer cooperation among ports, e.g. within the Hamburg-Le Havre range. Ports and terminals may see the opportunity to escape the spiral of ongoing efforts for deepening and widening the fairways and installing ever-bigger gantry cranes by agreeing on a joint policy with regard to maximum ship size.

The development of the current European economic area maritime cabotage market occurred when, at a policy level, the European Union forced the opening of its member-states cabotage markets to Community shipowners and extended this openness, in 1997, to the european free trade area countries. A two-tier cabotage market emerged, where a European economic area legislative framework co-exists with the legislative acts of each member-state. With such a unique background, this paper aims to investigate both the European economic area member-states and the rest of the world cabotage regimes and identify a list of reasons and policy measures used to implement cabotage policies.

By means of a desk research methodological approach, this paper analyses, from a geographical perspective, different countries’ cabotage policies and classifies them, and identifies in a systematically way a set of reasons and policy instruments that support each of chosen policies approach.

The outcome indicates that only a few countries promote free liberalised cabotage services and that most countries favour protectionist cabotage policies, whose governments can control the number of foreign vessels participating in these trades. Cabotage regimes have been categorised and the reasons behind both policies and respective policy instruments have been identified.

Quite often, researchers only focus on the cabotage policies of the European economic area countries, the USA, Australia, Japan and South Korea. This paper value rests on its ability to incorporate cabotage policies from other African, Asian and Latin American countries and to update existing information on the subject. Overall, this paper paves the way to broaden the cabotage knowledge.

This paper aims to conduct a review on cruise shipping and the cruise shipping industry. The current trends are analyzed for the industry, showing that this industry is still young and has great potential to boom. Meanwhile, the Asia market is the fastest growth region among the global, to which increasing cruise ships are repositioned by major cruise lines. However, for such a promising industry, the literature review on some state-of-the-art research works suggests that the research works that have been conducted for the cruise shipping are quite limited, and the majority of the works belongs to empirical and descriptive studies, which does not provide optimization-based quantitative analysis on some operation planning problems.

This paper conducts a review on cruise shipping and the cruise shipping industry.

In reality, there are some important operation planning problems faced by cruise lines or cruise ships, and four of them are addressed in this paper in response to the fast growing trend. The addressed operation planning problems are cruise fleet management, cruise ship deployment, cruise itinerary design and cruise service planning.

The importance and the attention for the research on the problems are also elaborated in the paper.