Guest Editorial: Special Issue on Maritime Transportation and Port Logistics

Abstract

This is the second time I have been involved as a Transportation Science Guest Editor of a focused or special issue related to maritime transportation. The first time was in the late 1990s, when Gilbert Laporte was Editor-in-Chief. Volume 33, Number 1 of the journal (February 1999) was a focused issue on maritime transportation. Focused means that many of the papers in the issue refer to a particular topic, as opposed to a special issue in which the entire issue is devoted to the topic. In the late 1990s it was very unclear what the yield of papers in this area would be. As it turns out, we received 14 submissions, four of which made it to the focused issue. I remember writing in the foreword of that issue that for all of its importance in world trade and global logistics, maritime transportation was still underrepresented within the transportation science and OR/MS literature. More than a decade and a half later, it is fair to say that the picture has improved considerably. The recent survey of Christiansen, Fagerholt, and Ronen (2013) on ship routing and scheduling catalogues 131 papers in the area, and the more specialized one of Meng et al. (2014) on containership routing and scheduling lists 93 references. Both confirm a strong trend in terms of number of papers, range of topics, and publication outlets. In addition, the number of researchers active in the interface of OR/MS and maritime transportation is growing strongly. Maritime transportation of course still remains at least as important to world trade as it was before. World seaborne trade grew from 30,648 to 52,418 billion ton-miles between 2000 and 2014, an increase of 71% over the period (UNCTAD 2014). Significant advances in ship technology such as containerships of more than 18,000 TEU1 have profound effects on the design and operation of the maritime logistics supply chain, including ports. These advances ran parallel with (and perhaps were caused by) increasing fuel prices over a long period (at least up to 2014) and also by significant regulatory developments to reduce emissions from ships and ports. Again, the logistical ramifications of these developments are significant and worthy of investigation.