Returns to scale are important in container shipping; service operators are continuing to increase the size of their vessels. Mr Seok-Min Lim's article 'Economies of container ship size' (Maritime Policy and Management, 21 (2) pages 149-160.1994) uses a sample of transpacific voyages to evaluate the effect of vessel scale on revenue and cost. Although the results are inconclusive, his study is…
The problem of scheduling identical quay cranes moving along a common linear rail to handle containers for a ship is studied. The ship has a number of container-stacking compartments called bays, and only one quay crane can work on a bay at the same time. The objective of the scheduling problem is to find the work schedule for each quay crane which minimizes the ship’s stay time in port. Find…
In 1969 the first of Sydney's purpose-built container facilities in Port Jackson, the Seatainer terminal, became operational. Later, in 1973, the second terminal at Glebe Island, a common-user facility, shared the task of handling the container traffic for much of eastern Australia until the development of the new facilities in Botany Bay. The two terminals differed in almost every respect exce…
This is an empirical analysis of the performance of the five major container ports of the East Coast of the United States: Boston, New York-New Jersey, Philadelphia. Baltimore and Hampton Roads. The data through 1978 indicate wide disparities in the productivity of these facilities. They also suggest that container ports exhibit signilicant returns to scale throughout the range of observation, …
This paper deals with the importance of port choice and container terminal selection for deep-sea container carriers. The paper focuses on the research question: on what basis do deep-sea container operators select container ports (strategy) and container terminals (financial reasons) in the Hamburg–Le Havre range over others? In answering this research question, three dimensions are addresse…
Container terminal performance is largely determined by its design decisions, which include the number and type of quay cranes, stack cranes, transport vehicles, vehicle travel path and stack layout.We investigate the orientation of the stack layout (parallel or perpendicular to the quayside) on the throughput time performance of the terminals. Previous studies in this area typically use deter…
If international container ports are to gain a proper appreciation of their various advantages, disadvantages and potential opportunities in a globally competitive environment, it is essential that they conduct effective evaluation of their operational performance. The present study applies five models of data envelopment analysis (DEA) to acquire a variety of complementary information about th…
More than a century ago far-sighted railroad builders and steamship operators were seeking the shortest intermodal itineraries between the eastern United States and the Orient. A combination of locational fact and the factual outcomes of 19thcentury railroad building left Chicago roughly equidistant in railway mileage from what became the four great us West-Coast port complexes in the Los Angel…
This paper presents a simple formulation in the form of a pipe network for modelling the global container-shipping network. The cost-efficiency and movement-patterns of the current container-shipping network have been investigated using heuristic methods. The model is able to reproduce the overall incomes, costs, and container movement patterns for the industry as well as for the individual shi…
This paper proposes an integrated set of 4Cs indices, namely, centrality index, competition index, congestion index and concentration index to examine network effects in the East Asia container port industry. Empirical analysis confirms that larger ports enjoy greater direct network effects related to economies of scale, whereas, smaller ports leverage on indirect network effects to widen their…
This paper seeks to develop a multi-commodity network model to analyse the flow of containers within the Asia Pacific context. The model is used to evaluate the impact of container throughput in Asia’s port by varying terminal handling charges and turnaround time. The three main regions analysed are north-east Asia, east Asia (Chinese port region) and south east Asia. Using the model, it coul…
Yard planning is essential for efficient operations in container terminals, especially for ports with limited storage space. To improve the utilisation of space and the efficiency of container handling in a terminal, operators require flexible yard space planning strategies to manage job workloads and yard-to-berth transportation costs. In previous studies, the inter-related decision making pro…
Increasing commercial and recreational pressures on urban waterfront lands, growing demand by seaports for back-up areas and changes in cargo-distribution concepts have caused the relocation of several port functions and the establishment of inland container terminals.
Major changes are occurring in the logistics of container shipping including growth in demands, increased ship size and development of new ports and routes to serve the US market. The Panama Canal is in the process of being expanded and potential exists for shipping through the Northwest Passage in addition to new ports being developed on the West Coasts of Canada and Mexico. All these alternat…
This paper evaluates the impact of risk factors from the container security initiative on Taiwan’s shipping industry by employing a risk management matrix to identify the severity and frequency of CSI risk factors, and discovers some appropriate risk management alternatives. This paper’s findings are as follows: (1) The majority of risk factors have a moderate-risk level, and possible alte…
We witnessed significant technological changes in shipping, including the development of jet aircraft engines and the use of containerization in ocean shipping. In the maritime industry, more than 90 percent of international cargo moves through seaports, and 80 percent of seaborne cargo moves in containers. This shows that the importance of seaborne trade, in particular, trade by containers. Th…
In recent years, an increase in the size of the container ships could be observed. The question is how these larger ships will influence the total generalised costs from a port of loading to a destination in the European hinterland. The second question is whether a scale increase of the container ships on other loops, such as a loop from the United States to Europe, has the same impact on the g…
The competitiveness of a container terminal is highly conditioned by the time that container vessels spend on it. The proper scheduling of the quay cranes can reduce this time and allows a container terminal to be more attractive to shipping companies. The goal of the Quay Crane Scheduling Problem (QCSP) is to minimize the handling time of the available quay cranes when performing the tasks of …
This paper addresses a highly researched area, the reshuffling problem in ports, using a newparadigm-modified containership service order in light of credit risk assessment. Container stacking and reshuffling operations can cause ship delays and additional risk. In deep-sea terminals, outbound containers are tightly stacked according to the retrieval sequence. Due to lack of space, terminals st…
The hatchcoverless container ship is an innovative design which improves cargo handling productivity. The paper develops a methodology for measuring the gains. the value which will accrue to the company over the life of the vessel.
In container port performance evaluation, a group of ports in one country is always significantly different from a group of ports in another country. This is noticed as the heterogeneity of port performance. It is therefore necessary to further investigate the impact of the different groups on efficiency evaluation of ports. The cross-evaluation method is a DEA extension tool to identify best p…
Railway container terminals, where gantry cranes are responsible for loading and unloading containers between freight trains and yards, are important hubs of hinterland logistics transportation. Terminal managers confront the challenge in improving the efficiency of their service. As the most expensive equipment in a terminal, the operational performance of gantry cranes is a crucial factor. In…
Today, approximately 90% of the world’s cargo is moved by ships and almost all general cargoes are transported in containers. Worldwide container traffic has increased over the last 20 years by 7% annually, and containerization has begun to seriously impact global trade patterns. As a result, container terminals have become very important nodes in the world’s supply chain. In this article, …
Coastal shipping is one of the most sustainable and economically competitive modes of transportation. This study employs the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) method to determine the importance of various factors influencing container carriers’ use of coastal shipping. A three-level hierarchical structure with the 17 attributes is proposed and tested. A previous AHP survey in Taiwan has indica…
We propose a new approach to forecasting total port container throughput: to generate forecasts based on each of the port’s terminals and aggregate them into the total throughput forecast. We forecast the demand for total container throughput at the Indonesia’s largest seaport Tanjung Priok Port, employing SARIMA, the additive and multiplicative Seasonal Holt-Winters (MSHW) and the Vector E…
My article in the June 1996 issue of this journal considered the relocation of container handling facilities for the largest deep-sea vessels from upstream urban ports to downstream terminals at coastal locations [I]. It was argued in the article that two upstream urban ports (Antwerp and Hamburg) have been unable to relocate their mainport function due principally to territorial (and hence pol…
The purpose of this article is to evaluate the service requirements of dedicated container terminals (DCTs). In this article, the service attributes (SAs) of DCTs were first discussed. A fuzzy analytic hierarchy process model was then constructed to measure the users’ perceived importance and dissatisfaction for each of the SAs. Based on these two measurements, a revised importance-performanc…
Most container terminals in the world today are operating up to their capacities. In this paper, we have developed a decision support system to optimise yard operations by considering all container flows (import, export and transshipment) through the yard with the view to improving terminal performance and efficiency. In another paper, we proposed an optimization model that determines optimal c…
This paper addresses empty container reposition planning by plainly considering safety stock management and geographical regions. This plan could avoid drawback in practice which collects mass empty containers at a port then repositions most empty containers at a time. Empty containers occupy slots on vessel and the liner shipping company loses chance to yield freight revenue. The problem is dr…
In this paper a two-stage Data Envelopment Approach is used to assess the relative efficiency of container shipping agents operating at Spanish ports, and studying the factors influencing it. In the first stage, an input-oriented, Variable Returns to Scale (VRS) model is used to compute efficiency scores of the different shipping agents. The model considers labor as input, and numbers of loaded…
Very large container ships are being built with the theoretical justification that they will produce economies of scale. It is clear, however. that the immediate result of the mega-ship buildings is an overtonnaging of the world's major liner routes. As major operators have put newer and bigger ships in the water, they have significantly reduced the slot costs in the container trades to which t…
Based on recent operation performance data, the earnings and costs of container service have been investigated in the context of two indices developed by the Japanese and used elsewhere in East Asian shipping: charter base and hire base. Although the average size of container ships on the world's main trade routes has increased over the past two decades it is dangerous to generalize about the e…
Containerization has been seen as primarily a maritime technology. The progression of container shipping services in the 1970s and early 1980s led to a restructuring of port systems around the world. Within the past several years, however, the most significant innovations in containerization in North America have occurred inland. Not only has there been an important geographical shift in the mo…
In recent years, the Hong Kong port has been challenged by the emergence of the Shenzhen port. This gives rise to a concern that the high terminal handling charges (THC) levied by the Hong Kong terminal operators are undermining the competitiveness of the Hong Kong port. As the major container terminals in both Hong Kong and Shenzhen are operated by the Hong Kong terminal operators, the monopol…
In the highly competitive environment of the port industry, port businesses should be provided with a strategic tool for positioning of their business. This paper suggests a model for port business positioning in a defined, competitive market based on the benchmarking technique. The main attributes of this model expand in three levels: (a) the port business can estimate its competitiveness usin…
The research focuses on the impact of the shipping strategy to decrease the commercial speed of container vessels, in order to reduce the bunker costs, on current service patterns. In this regard, the study also hypothesizes potential development trends in the near future. The reduction of the commercial speed, commonly referred to as “slow steaming,” has been introduced to mitigate the neg…
A methodology is proposed to determine the storage location of an arriving export container considering its weight. We consider the con®guration of the container stack and the weight distribution of containers in the yard-bay. A dynamic programming model is formulated to determine the storage location to minimize the number of relocation movements expected for the loading operation. We also de…
For the economic and financial evaluation of port investment projects, it is important to know the demand function of a port’s services. The objective of this study is to establish such a demand choice function for the Spanish container port services. The function is derived from the coefficients of a port choice model, for which a multinomial logit model is used and of which the coefficients…
Many countries seek to become a global logistics center linking major trading ports. They are competitively constructing container ports. The aggressive competition creates overcapacity situation in the container port sector. Massive investments are required to construct container ports with terminals, docks, storage areas and hinterlands. Nevertheless, it is not easy for container ports to hav…
The paper examines an important player in the container industry: the container terminal. We evaluate how terminal efficiency operation is affected by the following factors: terminal type, operation type, scale efficiency and returns to scale. In so doing, we test how the typology and operation of terminals and the level of scale efficiency that a terminal can achieve, represent significant fac…
This paper describes a case study of the research and development of an intelligent context-aware decision support system (ICADSS) prototype for real-time monitoring of container terminal operations in Hong Kong. We present the system design and development of the prototype system, and discuss the experiences and lessons learned. To the best of our knowledge, this study is the first identifiab…
Since the hub-and-spoke concept was introduced to the aviation market after the US airline deregulation in the late 1970s, it becomes a primary distribution model employed by leading international logistics companies. This pattern drives the companies to consolidate shipments on the large scale at major terminals (i.e. hub) and to redistribute the smaller scale of shipments to their respective …
Over the last four decades, the UK container port system experienced a shift to and concentration in the southeast of the country, close to the English Channel. At the same time, traditional ports in the north and centre of the country have lost importance, despite overall container traffic growth. This paper analyses the evolution of container traffic at UK ports, mapping the patterns of conta…
This paper focuses on the response of port authorities to the changing market environment in which they operate. It documents the changes taking place in the relationships between port authorities and terminal management companies and considers the strategic issues faced by these groups and other port interests. In particular, it investigates the potential con¯ icts of interest for a port auth…
Although containerization in Third World Asian ports may not conform to the 'usual' model of containerization in developed countries the region represents a significant generator of container tonnage. Moreover, despite considerable intraregional differences in throughput productivities, some of the ports are achieving efficienciesa nd productivities markedly higher than those in well establishe…
Containerization was introduced into Nigeria in the late 1960s, not through a deliberate policy but through the unilateral action of shipping companies. In spite of this, the percentage of the country's external trade cargo that is containerized grew from only about 0.03 in 1968-69 to about 8.6 in 1981. Containerization of cargo is more significant in the import than in the export trade. Perhap…
This study compares the evolution of container port systems in China and the USA in terms of port throughput, number of container ports and the concentration level in the container port system, based on the time-series data on these three features over the period 1979–2009 for China and 1970–2009 for the USA. The results show that the densities of container ports in the two countries are si…
The central subject of this paper is the efficiency of container terminals. Based on a database of European maritime, rail, and barge container terminals a technical efficien- cy analysis has been made. The analysis in this paper demonstrates that large differences in terminal efficiency can be found in Europe among maritime container terminals. Terminals that specialise in containers only perf…
The FIrst part of this paper brings into discussion some recent changes in the dynamics of the European container handling business, in particular as a result of vertical and horizontal integration strategies of container terminal operators. The industry structure has become su ciently consolidated to raise a fundamental question about whether market forces are su cient to prevent the abuse…
Research that examined the land utilization of the container terminals in a global perspective[1] revealed that the land utilization planned and achieved by Asian container terminals are much higher than the terminals in western Europe and North America. From the operational point of view, this has led to the question: `what are the impacts of these strategies in land utilization on the yard op…