Across Europe, countries are joining forces in order to implement European Commission initiatives as the Blue Growth Strategy and the Directive on Maritime Spatial Planning. Collaboration on how to perform stakeholder involvement as well as create cross-border solutions has become a key issue around the European sea basins and holistic spatial planning approaches similar to terrestrial planning practices are now being implemented in the marine environment. Among the sectors in marine governance is the maritime cultural heritage under water as well as in the coastal zone, where the example of the Baltic Sea Region illustrates how this sector has become an inherent part of the new Blue Growth discourse and the MSP-policy development across the region. In order to utilise this potential, support for collaboration and shared understandings within the maritime cultural heritage community of practise is needed. This research has focused on how to develop a spatially enabled digital and collaborative working environment to support the co-creation of new shared spatial planning concepts for maritime cultural heritage. The development of the platform itself has been carried out in a close cooperation with the actual users including cultural heritage experts, public authorities and research institutes in the Baltic Sea Region.
In 2018 the International Maritime Organization (IMO) agreed to cut the shipping sector’s overall CO2 output by 50% by 2050. One of the key methods in reaching this goal is to improve operations to limit fuel consumption. However, it is difficult to optimize speed for a complete liner shipping network as routes interact with each other, and several business constraints must be respected. This paper presents a unified model for speed optimization of a liner shipping network, satisfying numerous real-life business constraints. The speed optimization is in this research achieved by rescheduling the port call times of a network, thus, the network is not changed. The business constraints are among others related to transit times, port work shifts and emission control areas. Other restrictions are fixed times for canal crossing, speed restrictions in the piracy areas and desire for robust solutions. Vessel sharing agreements and other collaboration between companies must also be included. The modeling of the different restrictions is described in detail and tested on real-life data. The scientific contribution of this paper is threefold: We present a unified model for speed optimization together with numerous business constraints. We present a general framework for handling routes with different frequencies. Moreover, we present a bi-objective model for balancing robustness of schedules against fuel consumption. The tests show that the real-life requirements can be handled by mixed integer programming and that the model finds significant reductions of bunker consumption and cost for large-scale real-life instances.
In the present work, the determinants of port choice regarding container cargoes from specific hinterland regions are analyzed, based on an empirical study of Spain. Previous work has been extended by including novel explanatory variables for the market shares of ports in hinterland locations. Discrete choice theory is the methodological approach used here. More specifically, a nested logit model is proposed. As potential explanatory variables, the model includes maritime connectivity to specific overseas regions and intermodal connectivity of the port to specific hinterland locations. The empirical analysis is based on detailed Spanish customs data. The analysis shows that all variables hypothesized to influence the market share of a port in a specific hinterland region (i.e., road distance to the hinterland region, maritime distance, maritime connectivity of the port, and intermodal connectivity of the port) indeed influence significantly its market share, with the signs as expected. The findings add to the understanding of port competitiveness in specific regions with three conclusions: First, port hinterlands are relational, in the sense that they depend on the overseas origin or destination of the cargo; Second, the analysis suggests that ports that predominantly handle transhipment cargoes may have a “transhipment orientation,” which is an impediment for reaching hinterland markets; Third, intermodal connectivity is a determinant of the market share of a port in a certain hinterland region.
To evaluate the transportation time reliability of the maritime transportation network for China’s crude oil imports under node capacity variations resulting from extreme events, a framework incorporating bi-level programming and a Monte Carlo simulation is proposed in this paper. Under this framework, the imported crude oil volume from each source country is considered to be a decision variable, and may change in correspondence to node capacity variations. The evaluation results illustrate that when strait or canal nodes were subject to capacity variations, the network transportation time reliability was relatively low. Conversely, the transportation time reliability was relatively high when port nodes were under capacity variations. In addition, the Taiwan Strait, the Strait of Hormuz, and the Strait of Malacca were identified as vulnerable nodes according to the transportation time reliability results. These results can assist government decision-makers and tanker company strategic planners to better plan crude oil import and transportation strategies.
The activities and emissions from leisure boats in the Baltic Sea have been modeled in a comprehensive approach for the first time, using a new simulation model leisure Boat Emissions and Activities siMulator (BEAM). The model utilizes survey data to characterize the national leisure boat fleets. Leisure boats have been categorized based on their size, use and engine specifications, and for these subcategories emission factors for NOx, PM2.5, CO, non-methane volatile organic compounds (NMVOCs), and releases of copper (Cu) and zinc (Zn) from antifouling paints have been estimated according to literature values. The modeling approach also considers the temporal and spatial distribution of leisure boat activities, which are applied to each simulated leisure boat separately. According to our results the CO and NMVOC emissions from leisure boats, as well as Cu and Zn released from antifouling paints, are significant when compared against the emissions originating from registered commercial shipping in the Baltic Sea. CO emissions equal 70 % of the registered shipping emissions and NMVOC emissions equal 160 % when compared against the modeled results in the Baltic Sea in 2014. Modeled NOx and PM2.5 from the leisure boats are less significant compared to the registered shipping emissions. The emissions from leisure boats are concentrated in the summer months of June, July and August and are released in the vicinity of inhabited coastal areas. Given the large emission estimates for leisure boats, this commonly overlooked source of emissions should be further investigated in greater detail.
In this paper we extend the state-of-the-art stochastic programming models for the Maritime Fleet Renewal Problem (MFRP) to explicitly limit the risk of insolvency due to negative cash flows when making maritime shipping investments. This is achieved by modeling the payment of ships in a number of periodical installments rather than in a lump sum paid upfront, representing more closely the actual cash flows for a shipping company. Based on this, we propose two alternative risk control measures, where the first imposes that the cash flow in each time period is always higher than a desired threshold, while the second limits the Conditional Value-at-Risk. We test the two models on realistic test instances based on data from a shipping company. The computational study demonstrates how the two models can be used to assess the trade-offs between risk of insolvency and expected profits in the MFRP.
To achieve IMO’s goal of a 50% reduction of GHG emission by 2050 (compared to the 2008 levels), shipping must not only work towards an optimization of each ship and its components but aim for an optimization of the complete marine transport system, including fleet planning, harbour logistics, route planning, speed profiles, weather routing and ship design. ShipCLEAN, a newly developed model, introduces a coupling of a marine transport economics model to a sophisticated ship energy systems model – it provides a leap towards a holistic optimization of marine transport systems. This paper presents how the model is applied to propose a reduction in fuel consumption and environmental impact by speed reduction of a container ship on a Pacific Ocean trade and the implementation of wind assisted propulsion on a MR Tanker on a North Atlantic trade. The main conclusions show that an increase of the fuel price, for example by applying a bunker levy, will lead to considerable, economically motivated speed reductions in liner traffic. The case study sowed possible yearly fuel savings of almost 21 300 t if the fuel price would be increased from 300 to 1000 USD/t. Accordingly, higher fuel prices can motivate the installation of wind assisted propulsion, which potentially saves up to 500 t of fuel per year for the investigated MR Tanker on a transatlantic route.
Around 70% of our planet is covered by water. Just as human activities on land require planning, planning is also needed at sea. How can the space at sea be allocated to activities for use and protection in a space-saving way? How can we think across the different sectors so that marine planning is more coherent? These are questions that I am working to answer in my Ph.D. at Aalborg University, Copenhagen.
With expanding human uses at sea, the objective of maritime spatial planning (MSP) to promote sustainable coexistence between marine uses becomes an increasingly challenging task. In order to assess coexistence options, both use-use interactions and use-environment interactions are important to explore. Tools for doing cumulative impact assessments (CIA) on the environment provide a means for spatially exploring environmental impacts. Finding inspiration in such ecosystem-based spatial use-environment approaches while drawing on pairwise marine use compatibility knowledge from existing literature, a spatial approach to model potential synergies and conflicts between marine uses through an expert-based scoring system is presented and implemented in SEANERGY, an ArcMap-based opensource toolbox. A test based on Baltic Sea GIS data demonstrates how SEANERGY supplements CIA analyzes with knowledge about potential use-use synergies, potential use-use conflicts, and their spatial extents, useful for optimizing the use of marine space in MSP without putting too much cumulative pressure on the environment.
There is growing evidence that the ecosystem service (ES) concept can provide valuable input to marine spatial planning (MSP), by highlighting which ecosystem goods and services can be produced from a planning area. ES link the underlying ecosystem processes and functions to the benefits humans can receive from ecosystems (the ecosystem cascade). In this study, we argue that the ecosystem cascade can be used to structure the stock-taking and future scenario analysis in MSP. However, indicators, which are needed for measuring ES, have often been applied in various ways to the different steps of the cascade. Here, we apply a consistent approach to sorting indicators into the cascade. The indicators are presented in an indicator pool that can be used to filter them based on the cascade steps, several quality criteria, and themes. The pool consists of 772 indicators, of which 735 were analyzed. In total, 252 analyzed indicators belong to the provisioning services, 314 indicators to the regulating services and 169 to the cultural services. The indicator pool offers a suitable starting point to select indicators for ES assessments within MSP. Using indicators at the different cascade steps allows the assessment of i) the ecosystem components generating the services and ii) the impacts on ES and their beneficiaries when changes occur in the provision of the services due to planning or management decisions.