Dynamics of liner shipping network and port connectivity in supply chain systems: analysis on East Asia

The study of ports in supply chain systems is an emerging area of importance which has drawn more attention from researchers in recent years. This paper presents a new perspective in this research area by examining the calling patterns of container shipping services in order to understand the dynamics of port connectivity and inter-port relationships in the supply chains. Empirical evidence is drawn from four major ports in East Asia, namely Shanghai, Busan, Kaohsiung and Ningbo. The study identifies the shipping capacity, trade routes and geographical regions connected to the ports, shipping lines involved, and the extensity and intensity of inter-port relationships among the four container ports from liner shipping network’s perspective. The findings show that most of the shipping capacity employed on the major east–west trade routes became non-exclusive and involved calls at two or more of the four ports. Port planners, terminal operators and carriers could capitalise on opportunities through exploitation of complementary relationships that exist among the selected ports, such as offering a package for shipping lines to call at a portfolio of terminals owned by the same terminal operator. Policy and research implications as well as recommendations are discussed for various stakeholders concerned with port planning and regional development.     

Port system evolution – the case of Latin America and the Caribbean

The explosion of global container trade in the last two decades has significantly influenced the port geography of Latin America & the Caribbean (LAC), leading to a concentration of container traffic at selected ports. Theory suggests that, as port systems become mature, they tend to deconcentration, partly due to the emergence of secondary ports. Previous research has examined the region’s dominant ports, but an unanswered research question is how the evolution of this port system is influencing and being influenced by the actions of those ports currently occupying a secondary rank in the LAC port hierarchy.The methodology is based primarily on analysis of time series data on container movements between 1997 and 2012, revealing patterns of cargo flows and transhipment location choices. The institutional context of devolution processes and new investments in the region provides additional insight into the performance of selected ports. From a theoretical perspective, this analysis is situated within the context of recent institutional approaches that examine the port’s ability to act through critical moments and junctures, in order to deepen understanding of which of the various factors influencing port system deconcentration are the most sensitive to successful institutional adaptations.Results show that the manufacturing of strategic locations can be successful and may have driven the emergence of secondary ports in the LAC system. This finding demonstrates how path dependence can be challenged by new developments, the identification and success of which are nevertheless contingent on factors such as the first mover advantage, port planning regimes and diversification of port roles. The paper identifies some of the key factors influencing the transition of a port system from concentration at a few dominant ports to a deconcentrated system of primary and secondary ports, which can be applied to other port systems in future research.     

Patterns of maritime supply chains: slot capacity analysis

This paper offers a tool for analysing patterns of maritime supply chains. The study uses empirical data on slot capacity deployed by container shipping lines for analysing ports (as nodes) and routes and shipping lines (as links) that are embedded within the maritime supply chain. The ports of Singapore and Hong Kong are chosen to illustrate the respective transhipment and gateway perspectives. Findings reveal that geographical location and changes in the constitution of players can have reverberations on the maritime supply chain dynamics that traverse the port. Furthermore, evidence from trade route data also shows that maritime supply chain dynamics associated with transhipment and gateway ports could be governed by different levels of scope economies, demand complementarity and market power. The paper illustrates the abundant potential of slot capacity analysis for academic and industry/market research. Thus, future research can be pursued in various contexts and for different applications.     

Container freight rates and the role of surcharges

This paper demonstrates that the structure of ocean container freight rates has become more complex. A growing number of surcharges are being imposed by the carriers on their customers, surcharges that are not only adding significant extra costs but are highly variable over time. These elements are examined based on a data set of export rates from ports on the Northern European Range that have been compiled from a major global carrier. The paper compares the surcharges to the base rates and discusses some of the implications for shippers who face increasing uncertainty in planning supply chains. Some of the issues for academic research on freight rates is also examined and points to the need to clearly identify what is included in the freight rate data employed. In addition, questions are raised concerning the suitability of many of the variables traditionally used to explain or predict freight rates.     

Levels of internationalization in the container shipping industry: an assessment of the port networks of the large container shipping companies

This paper examines the internationalization level of the world’s largest container shipping companies by examining their port networks. The results of our analysis show that only three of the nineteen companies could be considered as being truly ‘International’ and service the ‘lion’s share’ of the major and minor ports distributed across the globe. The port networks of the other companies in our survey, whilst having individualized features, shared common characteristics. Guided by the ‘Uppsala Model of Incremental Internationalization’ (Johanson and Vahlne, 1977), we were able to identify four internationalization levels of a container shipping company that are indicated by their port network.We argue that the port network plays an additional role as it contributes to the internationalization level of the container shipping companies. This is important because the internationalization level affects the container shipping company’s ability to expand its customer base both at a local and international level. Local customers would have access to a larger international destination network and international customers would be able access a larger local distribution network without transhipping between different companies.Amongst other issues, we were able to determine that, for the analyzed container shipping companies, ‘Internationalization’ of a port network means including or excluding ports in specific regions or sub-regions in their own network, and that a company’s home base or history plays a significant role in this development.     

Knowledge management enablers in liner shipping

This study empirically identifies crucial knowledge management enablers and examines their impacts on organizational performance using survey data collected from liner shipping firms include shipping companies and agencies. Results indicated that knowledge management enablers such as organizational structure and knowledge management culture are found to have significantly positive effects on the organizational performance aspects of innovativeness, financial performance, and customer service, whereas information technology support is a positive effect on organizational performance aspect of innovativeness. Theoretical and managerial implications of the research findings on knowledge management for liner shipping companies are discussed.     

Hub location problems in transportation networks

In this paper we propose a 4-index formulation for the uncapacitated multiple allocation hub location problem tailored for urban transport and liner shipping network design. This formulation is very tight and most of the tractable instances for MIP solvers are optimally solvable at the root node. While the existing state-of-the-art MIP solvers fail to solve even small size instances of problem, our accelerated and efficient primal (Benders) decomposition solves larger ones. In addition, a very efficient greedy heuristic, proven to be capable of obtaining high quality solutions, is proposed. We also introduce fixed cost values for Australian Post (AP) dataset.     

Global intermodal liner shipping network design

This paper presents a holistic analysis for the network design problem of the intermodal liner shipping system. Existing methods for liner shipping network design mainly deal with port-to-port demand. However, most of the demand has inland origins and/or destinations. Thus, it is necessary to cope with inland origin–destination (OD) pairs involving a change in transport mode from inland transportation to maritime shipping. A method is first proposed to convert inland OD demand to port-to-port demand. Then, a framework for global intermodal liner shipping network design is proposed. Finally, the proposed methodology is applied to and numerically verified by a large-scale network example.     

Global intermodal tank container management for the chemical industry

The scale of the global chemical industry is enormous: in 2003, the total value of global production exceeded US$1.7 trillion. International logistics is especially crucial to the high-value chemicals industry, since raw materials sources, production facilities, and consumer markets are distributed globally. Fluctuating demand, imbalanced trade flows, and expensive transportation equipment necessitate dynamic asset management. This paper focuses on asset management problems faced by tank container operators, and formulates an operational tank container management problem as a large-scale multi-commodity flow problem on a time-discretized network. By integrating container routing and repositioning decisions in a single model, total operating costs and fleet sizes can be reduced. A computational study verifies this hypothesis.