Knowledge

The publication reports on a study of blockchain in the maritime sector with a focus on three value chains, namely container transport, fishing and processing of fish and shellfish, and plastic recycling. The publication describes different ways of using blockchain in the form of different types of companies, and with this as a starting point, the publication discusses the prerequisites for blockchain to be used in the analyzed value chains.

According to the narratives transmitted through media and political discourse, climate change reduces the ice coverage in the Arctic and enhances shipping and other forms of maritime activities. Especially, expectations of an increasing level of transit shipping between Asian, especially Chinese, ports and ports in Europe and North America is dominant. Evidence, however, tells that the numbers of transit shipping through the Arctic Ocean are very limited, and dominated by European shipping companies. For Greenland, political expectations have also been high, since Greenland has been seen as "strategically" situated in relation to new shipping routes in the Arctic, But, again, the actual development has been moderate and not related to international transits but conditions in Greenland itself.

Unmanned autonomous cargo ships may change the maritime industry, but there are issues regarding reliability and maintenance of machinery equipment that are yet to be solved. This article examines the applicability of the Reliability Centred Maintenance (RCM) method for assessing maintenance needs and reliability issues on unmanned cargo ships. The analysis shows that the RCM method is generally applicable to the examination of reliability and maintenance issues on unmanned ships, but there are also important limitations. The RCM method lacks a systematic process for evaluating the effects of preventive versus corrective maintenance measures. The method also lacks a procedure to ensure that the effect of the length of the unmanned voyage in the development of potential failures in machinery systems is included. Amendments to the RCM method are proposed to address these limitations, and the amended method is used to analyse a machinery system for two operational situations: one where the vessel is conventionally manned and one where it is unmanned. There are minor differences in the probability of failures between manned and unmanned operation, but the major challenge relating to risk and reliability of unmanned cargo ships is the severely restricted possibilities for performing corrective maintenance actions at sea.

In this webinar, Adrienne Mannov from Aarhus University and Peter Aske Svendsen from NFA presented their research on autonomous shipping as this relates to seafaring and technology, based on their 2019 report, “Transport 2040: Autonomous ships: A new paradigm for Norwegian shipping - Technology and transformation”.

The event was organized in collaboration with MARLOG

This study presents a novel approach to forecast freight rates in container shipping by integrating soft facts in the form of measures originating from surveys among practitioners asked about their sentiment, confidence or perception about present and future market development. As a base case, an autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) model was used and compared the results with multivariate modelling frameworks that could integrate exogenous variables, that is, ARIMAX and Vector Autoregressive (VAR). We find that incorporating the Logistics Confidence Index (LCI) provided by Transport Intelligence into the ARIMAX model improves forecast performance greatly. Hence, a sampling of sentiments, perceptions and/or confidence from a panel of practitioners active in the maritime shipping market contributes to an improved predictive power, even when compared to models that integrate hard facts in the sense of factual data collected by official statistical sources. While investigating the Far East to Northern Europe trade route only, we believe that the proposed approach of integrating such judgements by practitioners can improve forecast performance for other trade routes and shipping markets, too, and probably allows detection of market changes and/or economic development notably earlier than factual data available at that time.

This article seeks to provide a sociological understanding both of the logistics service field and of the impact the COVID-19 pandemic has had on this field. To address this issue, we analyze the case of logistics services used by the shipping industry to manage maritime safety, namely statutory and classification services. These services verify the compliance of shipping vessels with private and public safety norms. We develop the Bourdieusian concept of nomos, according to three dimensions: A normative framework, a legitimate vision, and structural divisions. The findings highlight a complex set of industrial and regulatory norms which give rise to complementary and sometimes overlapping obligations. Nomos materializes as some actors, typically IACS member societies, benefit from an uncontested legitimacy to deliver such services, whereas other actors are excluded for a variety of reasons.

This paper examines the statistical properties and the quality of the speed through water (STW) measurement based on data extracted from almost 200 container ships of Maersk Line’s fleet for 3 years of operation. The analysis uses high-frequency sensor data along with additional data sources derived from external providers. The interest of the study has its background in the accuracy of STW measurement as the most important parameter in the assessment of a ship’s performance analysis. The paper contains a thorough analysis of the measurements assumed to be related with the STW error, along with a descriptive decomposition of the main variables by sea region including sea state, vessel class, vessel IMO number and manufacturer of the speed-log installed in each ship. The paper suggests a semi-empirical method using a threshold to identify potential error in a ship’s STW measurement. The study revealed that the sea region is the most influential factor for the STW accuracy and that 26% of the ships of the dataset’s fleet warrant further investigation.

In this paper, we contribute to the literature on uncertainty and the drivers of social exchange. We explore the 2008 financial crisis and hand-collect unique data on more than 2,700 vessel chartering deals closed in the container shipping industry from 2000 to 2011. Our contribution is twofold. We challenge the literature by finding that low and high status players use different collaborative strategies under uncertainty: the high status players are more prone to coopetition and the low status ones reach out to external buyers. We also extend the literature on social exchange and uncertainty and introduce other constructs: strategic versatility and country-level long-term orientation of the suppliers that we study in our model. Our findings are relevant for policy and managerial decision-makers in the industry.

In 2021 DS Norden celebrated its 150 years anniversary. In this book Martin Jes Iversen is analyzing the history of the shipping company which is one of the oldest in Denmark. In the first 50 years after being founded in 1871, Norden was a pioneer firm in Danish shipping. This period was followed by five decades of financial stability and gradual stagnation. But in the early 1990s the firm started its journey to become one of the leading firms in the global dry-bulk market. As the world experienced technological, economical and political changes, Norden would also change. Some of these changes were incremental. Others were more abrupt. But they were never predictable.

This chapter presents the latest development in digital platforms for data sharing in Maritime Informatics as discussed in chapter 1—Responding to humanitarian and global concerns with digitally enabled supply chain visibility. Specifically, we use the TradeLens digital data sharing platform as a case study to illustrate the key actors in containerised global transport and the technical set-up (including the utilisation of a hybrid cloud, permissioned blockchain, and data exchange standards), the benefits and challenges for the individual types of actors, and the overall potential and future challenges of the TradeLens platform.

The potential of data sharing platforms is dependent on the wide adoption of the ecosystem. Today, there is a high interest for the TradeLens ecosystem, and many actors have already adopted the platform, due to the vast variety of benefits it provides to all actors in global trade. Regardless, some actors seem to face internal obstacles to adopting the platform, which are either low or high technical advancement. For these actors, a paradigm shift is necessary to move from a reactive to a proactive scheme enabled by a near real-time supply and logistics data network. Finally, we discuss the challenges of network collaboration.