Paying for harbor maintenance in the US: Options for moving past the Harbor Maintenance Tax

The Harbor Maintenance Tax is a fundamentally flawed maintenance funding mechanism for the critical US port system. Three alternatives were analyzed. User fee rates were estimated for either a national or regional tonnage based fee. Our results indicate that maintenance cost recovering regional fees could vary widely from about 10 cents per tonne to nearly 80 cents per tonne. A national rate would be about 30 cents per tonne. The large regional differences and affects on bulk shippers are likely to make implementing and maintaining cost recovering tonnage based fees infeasible. Two other mechanisms are considered. One possibility is to abolish the HMT without a replacement mechanism. The obvious strength of this approach is its simplicity, the weaknesses is that it is not budget neutral. Another possibility is to increase the federal diesel tax rate. One strength of the approach is the reasonable rate increase required to recover port maintenance costs (estimated between 0.278 and 0.315 cents per liter). An additional strength is that relatively inefficient fuel users will either make the largest share of the additional payments or the freight will shift modes to one that is more efficient. One weakness is that the rate has been unchanged since 1997, this points to the political difficulty involved in passing such a rate increase.     

Challenges for container river services on the Yangtze River: A case study for Chongqing

China plays an increasingly important role on the international economic scene and in global supply chains. Initially only coastal regions participated in global supply chains, but in recent years comparative cost advantages have led to an increased participation of inland destinations in China’s economic development. The growth of some inland regions has urged logistics players to revise and reconfigure their extensive logistics networks. This has been particularly the case in the Yangtze region. Upstream cities such as Chongqing are emerging as potential important production centres for the international markets.     

Green vehicle technology to enhance the performance of a European port: A simulation model with a cost-benefit approach

In this paper, we study the impact of using a new intelligent vehicle technology on the performance and total cost of a European port, in comparison with existing vehicle systems like trucks. Intelligent autonomous vehicles (IAVs) are a new type of automated guided vehicles (AGVs) with better maneuverability and a special ability to pick up/drop off containers by themselves. To identify the most economical fleet size for each type of vehicle to satisfy the port’s performance target, and also to compare their impact on the performance/cost of container terminals, we developed a discrete-event simulation model to simulate all port activities in micro-level (low-level) details. We also developed a cost model to investigate the present values of using two types of vehicle, given the identified fleet size. Results of using the different types of vehicles are then compared based on the given performance measures such as the quay crane net moves per hour and average total discharging/loading time at berth. Besides successfully identifying the optimal fleet size for each type of vehicle, simulation results reveal two findings: first, even when not utilising their ability to pick up/drop off containers, the IAVs still have similar efficacy to regular trucks thanks to their better maneuverability. Second, enabling IAVs’ ability to pick up/drop off containers significantly improves the port performance. Given the best configuration and fleet size as identified by the simulation, we use the developed cost model to estimate the total cost needed for each type of vehicle to meet the performance target. Finally, we study the performance of the case study port with advanced real-time vehicle dispatching/scheduling and container placement strategies. This study reveals that the case study port can greatly benefit from upgrading its current vehicle dispatching/scheduling strategy to a more advanced one.     

Container vessel fleet deployment for liner shipping with stochastic dependencies in shipping demand

The problem of optimal container vessels deployment is one of great significance for the liner shipping industry. Although the pioneering work on this problem dates back to the early 1990s, only until recently have researchers started to acknowledge and account for the significant amount of uncertainty present in shipping demand in real world container shipping. In this paper, new analytical results are presented to further relax the input requirements for this problem. Specifically, only the mean and variance of the maximum shipping demand are required to be known. An optional symmetry assumption is shown to further reduce the feasible region and deployment cost for typical confidence levels. Moreover, unlike previous work that tends to ignore stochastic dependencies between the shipping demands on the various routes (that are known to exist in the real world), our models account for such dependencies in the most general setting to date. A salient feature of our modeling approach is that the exact dependence structure does not need to be specified, something that is hard, if not simply impossible, to determine in practice. A numerical case study is provided to illustrate the proposed models.     

The multi-port berth allocation problem with speed optimization and emission considerations

The container shipping industry faces many interrelated challenges and opportunities, as its role in the global trading system has become increasingly important over the last decades. On the one side, collaboration between port terminals and shipping liners can lead to costs savings and help achieve a sustainable supply chain, and on the other side, the optimization of operations and sailing times leads to reductions in bunker consumption and, thus, to fuel cost and air emissions reductions. To that effect, there is an increasing need to address the integration opportunities and environmental issues related to container shipping through optimization. This paper focuses on the well known Berth Allocation Problem (BAP), an optimization problem assigning berthing times and positions to vessels in container terminals. We introduce a novel mathematical formulation that extends the classical BAP to cover multiple ports in a shipping network under the assumption of strong cooperation between shipping lines and terminals. Speed is optimized on all sailing legs between ports, demonstrating the effect of speed optimization in reducing the total time of the operation, as well as total fuel consumption and emissions. Furthermore, the model implementation shows that an accurate speed discretization can result in far better economic and environmental results.     

基于设计波法的超大型集装箱船疲劳强度评估

基于BV规范中的疲劳强度计算评估方法,论述了设计波法的基本原理,给出了确定设计波载荷的基本流程和疲劳累计损伤组合计算的方法,并据此对某超大型集装箱船的重点位置结构进行疲劳强度的计算分析与评估。     

欧洲集装箱内河运输经验借鉴

随着全球和区域经济网络的形成和发展,内河集装箱运输得到了迅猛发展,人们日趋认识到内河集装箱运输在集装箱多式联运体系中的重要价值和未来持续增长的潜力。为此,以欧洲集装箱内河运输经验为借鉴,对集装箱内河运输模式进行了分析,内容包括:内河集装箱发展演变特点、给予政府层面的集装箱内河运输推进模式等,在此基础上,对我国的内河集装箱运输,提出了若干建议。     

“两港一航”集装箱电子标签系统的应用示范研究

介绍了集装箱电子标签的国内外发展概况及其应用示范的意义,同时介绍了集装箱电子标签系统的设计思路和关键技术,最后总结了集装箱电子标签系统的创新点。     

铁路集装箱空箱调度模型及求解算法

从铁路集装箱运输市场的实际情况出发,设置相关的变量,建立基于顾客偏好的模糊运输规划模型和带时间窗的运输规划模型。针对这些特殊的运输问题,应用遗传算法去求其最优解,并设计了相应的矩阵编码方法、适应度计算、交叉算子和变异算子。给出一仿真实例,仿真结果表明上述两个模型的最优调度方案一致,证明运输正点率是提高运输服务质量的一个关键因素。     

大型集装箱船极限强度准则可靠性研究

本文对某一万箱级和某两万箱级的2型超大型集装箱船的极限承载能力分布、静水弯矩分布、波浪弯矩极值预报以及UR S11A要求的极限强度进行了分析，采用改进的一次二阶矩法（FORM），对2型船的失效概率进行计算，旨在验证满足UR S11A极限强度要求的超大型集装箱船的安全水平，以验证此强度准则的可靠性。