Just as containerized goods appear to flow seamlessly across the planet's oceans, internationalized and standardized certificates present seafaring labor as uniform and seamless. But underneath these certificates are the intimate and unequal entanglements of local masculinity norms, age, and kinship ties that sustain the maritime labor supply chain. In this article, we follow how three young, male seafarers from eastern India find ways to contain piracy risks at work and poverty risks at home, and their sense of obligation as men, sons, husbands, and fathers. By delving into the unequal conditions for industrial male workers from the Global South, this article demonstrates how containerized maritime labor commodities are not uniform but are dependent upon economic inequality and intimate kinship ties to be productive.
The maritime industry is a dangerous and highly technologicallysaturated sector. Unfortunately, advancement in automation and technologyhave not minimised human error as intended. Interaction between humansand technology in the industry is also overtly pre-scripted. The main reasonfor this is to reduce human error by ensuring predictability in interaction.Ultimately, investigations of non-routine interaction are often based on a hind-sight view of what went wrong in a given situation. This article analyses acollection of non-routine interactions that derive from a larger data corpus,using Discursive Psychology and Conversation Analysis. It argues that such astudy can capture what is missing from some investigations, namely, whatmakes sense for crews in the context of a given non-routine situation. Despitethe constraints and the challenges of technological complexity, this articleargues that reframing psychological matters in non-routine technologicallymediated interaction can be a new way of showing how such matters aredynamic, visible and manageable. This can inform the general debate of howto minimise human error, and more specifically, provide insight into the increas-ing inclusion of technology and as a consequence, the equally increasingamount of technologically mediated interaction that we will see in the future.
This article investigates how speakers in maritime technologically mediated interaction utilize pre-scripted interaction. The analysis uses micro-analytical methods that have not been used in the analysis of maritime interactions since the study by Bailey et al. (2006). In contrast to Bailey et al. (2006) who have analysed interactions between co-located speakers on board ships, this article analyses interactions between speakers who are not co-located. Micro-analytical methods can shed light on sense-making practices that speakers display in pre-scripted user-device interaction as pointed out by Arminen (2005). The article advances the observations of Bailey et al. (2006) regarding the ‘confirmatory form’ that they found predominant in co-located bridge team interaction. A ‘confirmatory form’ is a speaker display of the pre-script1 called a ‘readback’ (IMO SMCP, 2001), that speakers show when verifying information. The analysis shows that the structure of the ‘readback’ is used by speakers, is dependent on reflexive user-device interaction and involves a situated rule-following (Wittgenstein, 1958). The article then argues against the findings in The MARCOM Project (1999) that advocates that spoken interaction should be done away with completely as a way of promoting safe navigation, and concurs with studies in aviation research, that show how verbal interaction is an essential part of the situated understanding that takes place when performing institutional tasks (Sanne, 2003; Nevile, 2004a; Falzon, 2008, 2009).
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.
This study examines how the work of the International Law Commission (ILC) has contributed to the ‘progressive development’ of general international law relevant to regulating rescue and disembarkation of refugees and migrants found at sea. It explores the ILC’s texts on interpretation and implementation of international obligations, state responsibility, fragmentation and harmonization of international law, and the status of certain principles of general international law, including jus cogens general principles of law and the principle of good faith, which present legal parameters for regulation of maritime search and rescue operations. In conducting doctrinal examinations of international law and gathering evidence of the practice of States and other relevant actors, the ILC contributes by analysing, clarifying, and systemising important topics of general international law. However, state implementation frequently falls short of the legal interpretations of the ILC, particularly as they relate to respect for and protection of human rights at sea. Therefore, while the ILC needs new strategies to directly connect with States and international organisations, it remains reliant on the mutual following of national and international courts and tribunals, and its mutual contribution in scholarship.
Abstract In the quest for a numerical method for surface waves and wave-induced effects applicable when linear or weakly nonlinear methods are insufficient, a three-dimensional numerical wave tank assuming fully-nonlinear potential-flow theory is proposed. When viscous-flow effects, breaking waves or other violent flow-phenomena are not of primary importance, potential-flow methods may have similar capability in capturing the involved physics as Navier-Stokes solvers while being potentially more accurate in handling wave-propagation mechanism and more computationally efficient. If made sufficiently accurate, efficient and numerically robust, fully-nonlinear potential flow models can therefore represent a powerful tool in the study of ocean waves and their interaction with marine structures, which is the main motivation behind the present work. The governing Laplace equation for the velocity potential is solved using the harmonic polynomial cell method, which is a field method giving high-order accuracy provided that the cells used to describe the water domain have no stretching or distortion. This can only be achieved in a grid with cubic cells, which leads to poor numerical efficiency unless measures are introduced to refine the grid locally. Here, to improve the efficiency using strictly cubic cells, an adaptive grid refinement technique is introduced. It is shown that this has the ability to improve the computational speed with a factor of up to 20 without sacrificing accuracy. Numerical results are shown to be in good agreement with highly accurate nonlinear reference solutions for regular and irregular waves of various steepness up to the limit of theoretical wave breaking. For long-crested irregular waves, significant discrepancies with a second-order theory for the crest-height distribution are identified, while the second-order theory appears to provide a better description of the crest height for the single short-crested irregular sea state simulated. Having demonstrated that the proposed numerical method accurately models nonlinear wave phenomena up to the limit of wave breaking, future work should seek to implement wave-body interaction capabilities. The adaptive grid refinement technique, which refines the grid dynamically depending on the position of boundaries of interest, is developed with this application in mind. Except from providing a robust way of dealing with wave-body intersection points, extending the method to account for wave-body interactions should therefore involve limited difficulty.
The liner-shipping network design problem is to create a set of nonsimple cyclic sailing routes for a designated fleet of container vessels that jointly transports multiple commodities. The objective is to maximize the revenue of cargo transport while minimizing the costs of operation. The potential for making cost-effective and energy-efficient liner-shipping networks using operations research (OR) is huge and neglected. The implementation of logistic planning tools based upon OR has enhanced performance of airlines, railways, and general transportation companies, but within the field of liner shipping, applications of OR are scarce. We believe that access to domain knowledge and data is a barrier for researchers to approach the important liner-shipping network design problem. The purpose of the benchmark suite and the paper at hand is to provide easy access to the domain and the data sources of liner shipping for OR researchers in general. We describe and analyze the liner-shipping domain applied to network design and present a rich integer programming model based on services that constitute the fixed schedule of a liner shipping company. We prove the liner-shipping network design problem to be strongly NP-hard. A benchmark suite of data instances to reflect the business structure of a global liner shipping network is presented. The design of the benchmark suite is discussed in relation to industry standards, business rules, and mathematical programming. The data are based on real-life data from the largest global liner-shipping company, Maersk Line, and supplemented by data from several industry and public stakeholders. Computational results yielding the first best known solutions for six of the seven benchmark instances is provided using a heuristic combining tabu search and heuristic column generation.
In this research, two crucial optimization problems of berth allocation and yard assignment in the context of bulk ports are studied. We discuss how these problems are interrelated and can be combined and solved as a single large scale optimization problem. More importantly we highlight the differences in operations between bulk ports and container terminals which highlights the need to devise specific solutions for bulk ports. The objective is to minimize the total service time of vessels berthing at the port. We propose an exact solution algorithm based on a branch and price framework to solve the integrated problem. In the proposed model, the master problem is formulated as a set-partitioning problem, and subproblems to identify columns with negative reduced costs are solved using mixed integer programming. To obtain sub-optimal solutions quickly, a metaheuristic approach based on critical-shaking neighborhood search is presented. The proposed algorithms are tested and validated through numerical experiments based on instances inspired from real bulk port data. The results indicate that the algorithms can be successfully used to solve instances containing up to 40 vessels within reasonable computational time.
This review article presents a summary of the main categories of models developed for modeling cavitation, a multiphase phenomenon in which a fluid locally experiences phase change due to a drop in ambient pressure. The most common approaches to modeling cavitation along with the most common modifications to said approaches due to other effects of cavitating flows are identified and categorized. The application of said categorization is demonstrated through an analysis of selected cavitation models. For each of the models presented, the various assumptions and simplifications made by the authors of the model are discussed, and applications of the model to simulating various aspects of cavitating flow are also presented. The result of the analysis is demonstrated via a visualization of the categorizations of the highlighted models. Using the preceding discussion of the various cavitation models presented, the review concludes with an outlook toward future improvements in the modeling of cavitation.
In this study, the periodic train timetabling problem is formulated using a time-space graph formulation that exploits the properties of a symmetric timetable. Three solution methods are proposed and compared where solutions are built by what we define as a dive-and-cut-and-price procedure. An LP relaxed version of the problem with a subset of constraints is solved using column generation where each column corresponds to the train paths of a line. Violated constraints are added by separation and a heuristic process is applied to help to find integer solutions. The passenger travel time is computed based on a solution timetable and Benders’ optimality cuts are generated allowing the method to integrate the routing of the passengers. We propose two large neighborhood search methods where the solution is iteratively destroyed and repaired into a new one and one random iterative method. The problem is tested on the morning rush hour period of the Regional and InterCity train network of Zealand, Denmark. The solution approaches show robust performance in a variety of scenarios, being able to find good quality solutions in terms of travel time and path length relatively fast. The inclusion of the proposed Benders’ cuts provide stronger relaxations to the problem. In addition, the graph formulation covers different real-life constraints and has the potential to easily be extended to accommodate more constraints.