This chapter concerns the digitalization of the maritime sector with a specific focus on business models. It is the argument of the article that current research in Maritime Informatics is focused on technological optimizations and thus lacks a commercial aspect in order to grasp the importance of digitalization in the shipping sector. In order to fill this gap a business model framework is suggested in the article with focus on the level of respectively customer-based-value-propositions and land versus sea. Then follows the empirical case of the Danish shipping company Norden and the development from 2015 to 2020. Norden is a leading commercial operator of dry bulk and product tanker vessels with more than 350 vessels in operation. The conclusion of the case is that Norden so far has regarded digitalization as tool for decision taking processes, which in the long-term should lead to compete advantages in terms of more efficient decisions based on big data and advanced algorithms. The shipping company has on the other hand decided not to use digitalization for the development of new software products and in accordance to presented digitalization matrix focused on indirect value proposition for the customers rather than direct customer-based initiatives. This focus confirms the hypothesis that digitalization in the dry bulk and tanker segment will often be based on indirect value propositions while digitalization in container-shipping might have a more direct relation to specific customer-based value propositions. This distinction is linked to the business-to-business nature of dry bulk and tanker and the more mixed business to business/business to consumer nature of container shipping—in. particular when the container shipping is integrated to the value chains and thus moved closer to the ultimate customers’ preferences and services.
This paper studies the Quay Crane Scheduling Problem (QCSP). The QCSP determines how a number of quay cranes should be scheduled in order to service a vessel with minimum makespan. Previous work considers the QCSP to be a combinatorially hard problem. For that reason, the focus has been on developing efficient heuristics. Our study shows, however, that the QCSP is tractable in the realistic setting, where quay cranes can share the workload of bays. We introduce a novel linear time algorithm that solves the QCSP and prove its correctness.
The oceans, covering approximately 70% of Earth's surface, play a pivotal role in climate regulation, biodiversity, and biogeochemical processes. The large and growing volume and complexity of ocean data, spanning diverse disciplines and formats, and dispersed across a wide range of sources, presents opportunities and challenges for advancing scientific research, informing policy, and addressing societal needs.
In this review paper we aim to create an easy-to-navigate map of the field of ocean data, enabling the reader to establish a broad understanding of the ocean data sector, and bridging gaps between different disciplines and levels of familiarity with ocean data. This is done through the concept of the "data ecosystem", which is used to describe the actors, organisations, and infrastructures involved in all aspects of the data value chain. We propose a structured ocean data ecosystem model as a method for comprehensive mapping of the ocean data market landscape. The proposed model consists of five key elements: stakeholders, societal elements, data sources and product offering, standards and best practices, and emerging technologies. We provide an up-to-date analysis of ocean data sources and emerging solutions and a summary of relevant data standardization efforts such as marine standards, vocabularies, and ontologies. All this will promote the development of needs-based solutions, components, products, services, and technologies, thus contributing to the evolution of the ocean data ecosystem and promoting data-based ocean research.
Successful maritime spatial planning processes require stakeholder engagement and participation, thus requiring tools that support collaboration. Communication-driven spatial decision support systems are designed to facilitate decision making processes of complex spatial problems and are therefore suited for this task, but there are unresolved questions about user access control for these systems. In this study, user access control was designed for a spatial decisions support system for collaborative maritime spatial planning based on observation of two user tests. It was found that there were three distinct groups of users with special access needs to collaborative functionality. The level of access to functionality was organized into three groups: passive participants, actively contributing collaborators and managing moderators.
The DNV Nordic Maritime Universities Workshop is organized as a collaboration between DNV and universities in the Nordic region with a maritime related education or research line. The workshop covers all research topics related to naval architecture, maritime engineering and maritime transport, including safety, energy efficiency and environmental performance, environmental pressures, new technologies and digitalization. The 25th Nordic Maritime Universities Workshop was held on 30-31 January 2025 at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU), Lyngby Campus. The workshop has been organized and hosted by the Maritime Group at the Department of Civil and Mechanical Engineering (DTU Construct). In total we received 77 abstracts from 7 countries. This includes 23 abstracts from Denmark, 23 from Sweden, 16 from Norway, 10 from Germany, 3 from Finland, 1 from The Netherlands, and 1 from Poland. The presentation of the abstracts and the talks is carried out over two days of the workshop and in 10 sessions, distributed over 7 topics:
• Maritime Safety & Risk Reduction (17 talks)
• Structures & Ship Design (8 talks)
• Numerical Methods & Marine Hydrodynamics (14 talks)
• Ship Operations & Navigation (14 talks)
• Autonomous Shipping & Digitalization (8 talks)
• Alternative Marine Fuels (8 talks)
• Wind Assisted & Alternative Propulsion (8 talks)
This year a special issue has been initiated in International Shipbuilding Progress to commemorate the 25th Nordic Maritime Universities Workshop. All abstract presenters have been invited to submit a full paper, to be considered for publication in this journal after a peer-review process. This compendium includes the workshop program, the session details and the 77 abstracts arranged in alphabetical order.
Since the outbreak of COVID-19, its impacts on the maritime transportation and logistics field have been multi-dimensional. In addition to the green shipping corridor proposed by the Clydebank Declaration in the United Kingdom in 2021, port digitalisation and decarbonisation of the maritime industry have become focal issues in the field. The industry needs a new framework to offset the negative impacts of the pandemic and to accommodate integrated technologies comprising of artificial intelligence (AI), blockchain, cloud systems, internet of things (IoT) and others, which have been applied to the industry. Having considered these circumstances, this paper aims to propose the 6th-generation ports model with smart port (6GP) as a new framework for the port logistics industry in the post-COVID-19 period. The proposed 6GP contributes to providing business development strategy and port development policy for stakeholders in the industry in the post-pandemic era reflecting focal challenges such as digitalisation, decarbonisation, sustainability and smart transformation. It also contributes to expanding port devolution theory from the fifth-generation ports (5GP) to 6GP.
Each year maritime accidents occur at sea causing human casualties. Training facilities serve to reduce the risk of human error by allowing maritime teams to train safety procedures in cooperative real-size immersive simulators. However, they are expensive and only few maritime professionals have access to such simulators. Virtual Reality (VR) can provide a digital all-immersive learning environment at a reduced cost allowing for increased access. However, a key ingredient of what makes all-immersive physical simulators effective is that they allow for multiple participants to engage in cooperative social interaction. Social interaction which allows trainees to develop skills and competencies in navigating situational awareness essential for safety training. Social interaction requires social fidelity. Moving from physical simulators into digital simulators based upon VR technology thus challenges us as HCI researchers to figure out how to design social fidelity into immersive training simulators. We explore social fidelity theoretically and technically by combining core conceptual work from CSCW research to the design experimentation of social fidelity for maritime safety training. We argue that designing for social fidelity in VR simulators requires designers to contextualize the VR experience in location, artifacts, and actors structured through dependencies in work allowing trainees to perform situational awareness, coordination, and communication which are all features of social fidelity. Further, we identify the risk of breaking the social fidelity immersion related to the intent and social state of the participants entering the simulation. Finally, we suggest that future designs of social fidelity should consider not only trainees in the design, but also the social relations created by the instructors’ guidance as part of the social fidelity immersion.
The abatement of greenhouse gas emissions represents a major global challenge and an important topic for transportation research. Several studies have argued that energy efficiency measures for virtual arrival and associated reduced anchorage time can significantly reduce emissions from ships by allowing for speed reduction on passage. However, virtual arrival is uncommon in shipping. In this paper, we examine the causes for waiting time for ships at anchor and the limited uptake of virtual arrival. We show the difficulties associated with the implementation of virtual arrival and explain why shipping is unlikely to achieve the related abatement potential as assumed by previous studies. Combining onboard observations with seafarers and interviews with both sea-staff and shore-based operational personnel we show how charterers’ commercial priorities outweigh the fuel saving benefits associated with virtual arrival. Moreover, we demonstrate how virtual arrival systems have unintended, negative consequences for seafarers in the form of fatigue. Our findings have implications for the IMO’s greenhouse gas abatement goals.
Recent advances, especially in deep learning, allow to effectively detect ship targets in surveillance videos. However, the translation of these detections to the real-world locations of ships has not been sufficiently explored. The common approach in the literature is using a transformation matrix to convert a pixel to a real-world coordinate. However, this approach has three shortcomings: first, a set of reference point pairs has to be manually prepared to establish the matrix; second, the matrix always maps a pixel to the same real-world coordinate, ignoring that there is no one-to-one correspondence between discrete pixel coordinates and continuous real-world coordinates; third, this approach can only work with one camera. In light of this, we propose a technique PixelToRegion that explicitly takes into account the uncertainty in coordinate conversion by mapping each pixel to a spatial polygon. Next, we propose a new algorithm MCbSLE that can estimate ship locations using pixel sets from multiple cameras. The precision of location estimation by MCbSLE is enhanced through spatial intersection between polygons from different cameras. Experiments are conducted under 16 carefully designed multi-camera settings to evaluate MCbSLE wrt four factors: different ports, the number of cameras, the distance between cameras, and camera headings. Results on one-day ship trajectory data show that (1) an 79.8% accuracy in the number of coordinates can be achieved by MCbSLE when there are no more than 10 ships in camera views; (2) using multiple cameras can improve the precision of location estimation by one order of magnitude compared with using one camera.
The report is organized as follows. The introduction will lay out the current state-of-play of eco-efficiency and the zeitgeist of the current situation on maritime that we find ourselves in, in 2020. The next section will provide some historical context looking back to 2010 and 2000 to trace the trajectory and developmental course that we are on. The core contribution of this report is the Shipyard 4.0 Roadmap, that can be found in Figure 1 on page 9. This illustration plots the expectations for technological capabilities and policy from 2020 to 2030. The descriptions of the elements of the roadmap are provided in Appendix 1.