Innovation and Patenting within Containerized Liner Shipping

Increasingly, in many industries, companies commercialize their technology and innovations through patenting to gain an edge over competition. Within the maritime sector, while literature on innovation is expanding, issues related to the importance of intangible assets, such as patenting, for the participant firms of the industry remain unaddressed. Utilizing innovational frameworks and patent data withdrawn from European Patent Organization’s (EPO’s) database, the aim of this paper is to investigate the innovative level, in terms of patents granted, of incumbent market actors in liner shipping. Apart from patent counts, this exercise sheds light on the areas to which these patents apply, providing a classification while also investigating additional attributes which relate to patent citations, investors and applicants. Although results indicate a varying degree of utilization of the patenting system amongst liner carriers, they nonetheless affirm to some extent that knowledge creation is a valuable tool in the arsenal of some liner carriers, and that patenting is one of the various means utilized to enhance their market position and achieve a sustained competitive advantage. In addition, findings suggest that liner carriers’ innovative efforts have, based on the forward citations received, some significance, while they focus primarily the development of patented technologies which enhance the operational efficiency of their vessels. In this respect, the investigation undertaken sheds some light and provides a novel perspective on understanding the behaviour and innovative propensity of liner shipping companies.

“Liner shipping”

The aim of the study was to analyze the scientific views on the definition of liner shipping at various stages of its development. For this, literary sources for more than a hundred years of research on this issue were analyzed. The analysis emphasizes the lack of systemic studies on this issue and the scientific approach to the definition of the concept in question. As a result of the study, the stages of development of liner shipping are presented and the main characteristic features for the concept are given, its boundaries are established. The resulting research also synthesizes the scientific papers in the field of liner shipping, which represents an important supporting tool for future theoretical and applied studies. Taking into account the exceptional role of liner shipping in intermodal delivery systems, the presented analysis is useful for all involved transport modes.

Distributionally Robust Joint Chance Constrained Vessel Fleet Deployment Problem

This work investigates the problem of vessel fleet deployment for liner shipping. The objective is to minimize the total cost, i.e., the sum of vessel chartering cost and vessel-route operating cost. In the considered problem, the shipment demand for each route is uncertain and its distribution is unknown. Due to lacking historical data, we use the moment-based ambiguity set to characterize the unknown distributions of demands. We then introduce a distributionally robust model and propose a new approximation approach to solve this problem. Finally, numerical experiments are conducted to demonstrate the performance of our approximation approach.

Integrated Optimization of Port Rotation Direction and Fleet Deployment for Container Liner Shipping Routes

This paper provides an integrated planning methodology for the optimization of port rotation direction and fleet deployment for container liner shipping routes with consideration of demand uncertainty. We first consider a special case that demand is deterministic. A multicommodity flow network model is developed via minimizing the total network-wide cost. Its decisions are the selection of port rotation direction and fleet deployment and container routings in the shipping network. Afterward, we address the generic case that uncertain demand is considered, which is represented by potentially realizable demand scenarios. We develop a minimax regret model to procure the least maximum regret across all the demand scenarios. The proposed models are applied to an Asia-Europe-Oceania liner shipping network with 46 ports and 12 ship routes. Results could provide the liner company with a comprehensive decision tool to simultaneously determine port rotation direction and fleet deployment when tackling uncertain demand.

Dynamic recovery actions in multi-objective liner shipping service with buffer times

This paper investigates the dynamic recovery policies for liner shipping service with the consideration of buffer time allocation and uncertainties. We aim to allocate the buffer time at the tactical level and then determine the optimal policy, including speed optimization strategy, port skipping and acceleration rate choice, for recovering from disruptions due to various uncertainties or random adverse events, which cause vessel delays. To achieve this, we attempt to obtain the optimal balance among economic, environmental and service-reliable objectives. A novel mathematical formulation is introduced to solve the robust vessel scheduling problem with short- and long-term decisions. Furthermore, we propose and test two heuristics to solve the proposed model. Experiments on the container liner shipping service show the validity of the model and some managerial insights are gained from them.

Maximization of container slot booking profits for carriers in the liner shipping industry

In the liner shipping industry, if a shipper wants to transport its cargo by container ships, it first needs to contact a carrier to book container slots based on the estimated transportation demand. However, one problem in the booking process is that the actual demand is uncertain, resulting in mismatch between the required demand and the booked quantity. To address this issue, this study develops a Newsvendor model to find the optimal order quantity of container slots for the shipper. In addition, uncertainties in the quantity of container slots booking made by the shipper might cause revenue loss to the carrier and low utilization of ship capacity in the daily operations of liner shipping services. Therefore, this study suggests that the shipper should pay reservation fee when booking container slots. This study also aims to find the maximum profit for the carrier under the optimal order quantity of the shipper. In sensitive analysis, how different prices per container slot offered by the carrier would influence the reservation fee, the optimal order quantity of the shipper, and the expected profit of the carrier are explored and discussed. This study can help to manage and promote the online container booking systems in the liner shipping industry.