Network Of Ports Research Articles

A Decomposition-Based Heuristic for Collaborative Scheduling in a Network of Open-Pit Mines

We consider the short-term production scheduling problem for a network of multiple open-pit mines and ports. Ore produced at each mine is transported by rail to a set of ports and blended into signature products for shipping. Consistency in the grade and quality of production over time is critical for customer satisfaction, whereas the maximal production of blended products is required to maximise profit. In practice, short-term schedules are formed independently at each mine, tasked with achieving the grade and quality targets outlined in a medium-term plan. However, because of uncertainty in the data available to a medium-term planner and the dynamics of the mining environment, such targets may not be feasible in the short term. We present a decomposition-based heuristic for this short-term scheduling problem in which the grade and quality goals assigned to each mine are collaboratively adapted—ensuring the satisfaction of blending constraints at each port and exploiting opportunities to maximise production in the network that would otherwise be missed.

A hub and spoke network model to analyse the secondary dispersal of introduced marine species in Indonesia

Abstract Indonesia is a biodiversity hotspot threatened with new introductions of marine species. As with many countries, Indonesia has a stratified shipping network of international ports linked to a large suite of domestic ports. We developed a hub and spoke network model to examine the risk associated with the secondary transfer of introduced marine species from the port hub of Tanjung Priok in Jakarta Bay to the 33 Indonesian provinces (including other ports in the Jakarta province). An 11-year shipping dataset was used (vessel next port of call records for maritime vessels that originated in Jakarta Bay and that remained in domestic waters) to derive a province ranking of vulnerability. Fifteen provinces represented almost 94% of the traffic frequency, with East Java and Jakarta provinces dominating. All urban provinces featured within the top seven highest frequency traffic provinces. Traffic patterns reflect an intra-coastal reliance on shipping, with traffic frequency decreasing with distance from Jakarta Bay. Provinces were regionalized into three categories (Lampung to East Java, Makassar Straits, and Malacca Straits) each with different vulnerabilities based on their values.

Study on Data Transfer Mode of Port Logistics Operating Machinery Based on Industrial Ethernet

To set up a data transmission network is vital for Fangcheng ports modernization.This paper analyses the requirements of Fangcheng ports data transmission of logistics equipments.The realization of industrial ethernet technology in the Fangcheng port intelligent monitoring system is introduced. Then the ideal industrial ethernet network topology of Fangcheng port and the data transmission network of Fangcheng ports logistics equipments are designed.

Temperature Dependence of Thermal Properties of Sands across a Wide Range of Temperatures (30–70°C)

Due to the dynamic nature of the shallow subsurface, knowledge of soil thermal properties across a wide range of soil moisture and temperature conditions is necessary to accurately describe heat transport in many settings. Soil thermal properties are difficult to measure at high temperatures, however, due to the lack of suitable measurement devices and the potential for measurement‐induced changes. Therefore, thermal property data are often scarce and incomplete and very often limited to specific soils. Due to this scarcity of accurate experimental data, empirical relationships often do not accurately predict the thermal properties of soils as a function of both soil moisture and temperature. In this study, thermal conductivity and diffusivity were measured for silica sands under loose and tight packing conditions and a field sand under varied water saturation and temperature. Several recent sensor‐based technologies were integrated into a small cell modified to have a network of sampling ports, continuously monitoring water saturation, temperature, and soil thermal properties. For the test sands studied, data showed that the thermal conductivity and diffusivity increased noticeably for sample temperatures >50°C. At sample temperatures between 30 and 50°C, any change in thermal properties with temperature was small. Thermal conductivities measured in this study were compared with independent estimates made using empirical models from the literature. In general, good agreement was observed for most thermal conductivity data when proper fitting parameters were established, except at intermediate saturation values.

STRATEGIC PRIORITIES OF THE SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT OF NAVIGATION IN UKRAINE

The article is dedicated to the strategic priorities of the development of navigation in Ukraine by improving the investment attractiveness and sustainable development of the marine economic sector of the complex. And this will contribute to accelerating the development of transport infrastructure and its integration into the modern world of transport and logistics system of cargo delivery. In recent times the problems of development of navigation are of particular importance due to the fact that even in times of crisis this sphere of activity was on the increase. The need to reduce the cost of goods and services in times of crisis determines the movement of production systems to the countries with low-cost resources (China, Asia, etc.). And this, in turn, has an influence on the development of transport, particularly the maritime transport, as one of the cheapest and environmentally friendly ones. Ukraine has an advantageous geographical location, the longest coastline and sea borders among the Black Sea countries, developed network of ports, roads and railways. All these factors are the basis of great potential for development of the maritime industry. However, in recent years, the country has significantly weakened its position in the Black Sea and Sea of Azov region and the other regions of the world ocean. It is because of the general trend of elimination of the country from the possibilities of using the present resources of the world maritime space.

The Ports of the State of Santa Catarina (Brazil): Identifying the Key Problems Faced by the Export Industry

Due to the Brazilian large territory, the network of ports was structured in order to to meet the demands at national and global scales. In southern Brazil, more specifically in the State of Santa Catarina, the ports are an inseparable component of the set of characteristics which allowed the state to become, over the 20th century, one of the most industrialized regions in Brazil. The increase in industrial exports of Santa Catarina, mainly after the 1980s, resulted in a more diversified exporting agenda, which benefited from the existing transport infrastructure: roads, airports, rail ways, and ports. This research aimed at identifying and analyzing the main problems regarding ports infrastructure of the state, which affects the large exporting industries. The research methods used were: a) bibliographic and documents review; b) questionnaire survey and semi-structured interviews with a diversified sample including 40 of the largest exporting companies in Santa Catarina; and c) processing and analysis of the data and information collected. The use of questionnaire survey and semi-structured interviews aimed at: eliciting and characterizing the main problems facing the ports infrastructure in the state and identifying the competitive advantages and disadvantages compared to worldwide market competitors.

THE PORTS OF THE STATE OF SANTA CATARINA (BRAZIL): IDENTIFYING THE KEY PROBLEMS FACED BY THE EXPORT INDUSTRY

Due to the Brazilian large territory, the network of ports was structured in order to to meet the demands at national and global scales. In southern Brazil, more specifically in the State of Santa Catarina, the ports are an inseparable component of the set of characteristics which allowed the state to become, over the 20th century, one of the most industrialized regions in Brazil. The increase in industrial exports of Santa Catarina, mainly after the 1980s, resulted in a more diversified exporting agenda, which benefited from the existing transport infrastructure: roads, airports, rail ways, and ports. This research aimed at identifying and analyzing the main problems regarding ports infrastructure of the state, which affects the large exporting industries. The research methods used were: a) bibliographic and documents review; b) questionnaire survey and semi-structured interviews with a diversified sample including 40 of the largest exporting companies in Santa Catarina; and c) processing and analysis of the data and information collected. The use of questionnaire survey and semi-structured interviews aimed at: eliciting and characterizing the main problems facing the ports infrastructure in the state and identifying the competitive advantages and disadvantages compared to worldwide market competitors.

Trade-associated pathways of alien forest insect entries in Canada

Long-distance introductions of new invasive species have often been driven by socioeconomic factors, such that traditional “biological” invasion models may not be capable of estimating spread fully and reliably. In this study we present a new methodology to characterize and predict pathways of human-assisted entries of alien forest insects. We have developed a stochastic quantitative model of how these species may be moved with commodity flow through a network of international marine ports and major transportation corridors in Canada. The study makes use of a Canadian roadside survey database and data on Canadian marine imports, complemented with geo-referenced information on ports of entry, populated places and empirical observations of historical spread rates for invasive pests. The model is formulated as a probabilistic pathway matrix, and allows for quantitative characterization of likelihoods and vectors of new pest introductions from already or likely-to-be infested locations. We applied the pathway model to estimate the rates of human-assisted entry of alien forest insect species across Canada as well as cross-border transport to locations in the US. Results suggest a relatively low nationwide entry rate for Canada when compared to the US (0.338 new forest insect species per year vs. 1.89). Among Canadian urban areas, Greater Toronto and Greater Vancouver appear to have the highest alien forest insect entry potential, exhibiting species entry rates that are comparable with estimated rates at mid-size US urban metropolises.

Study on a Liner Shipping Network Design Considering Empty Container Reposition

Empty container allocation problems arise due to imbalance on trades. Imbalanced trade is a common fact in the liner shipping,creating the necessity of repositioning empty containers from import-dominant ports to export-dominant ports in an economic and efficient way. The present work configures a liner shipping network, by performing the routes assignment and their integration to maximize the profit for a liner shipping company. The empty container repositioning problem is expressly taken into account in whole process. By considering the empty container repositioning problem in the network design, the choice of routes will be also influenced by the empty container flow, resulting in an optimum network, both for loaded and empty cargo. The Liner Shipping Network Design Program (LS-NET program) will define the best set of routes among a set of candidate routes, the best composition of the fleet for the network and configure the empty container repositioning network. Further, a network of Asian ports was studied and the results obtained show that considering the empty container allocation problem in the designing process can influence the final configuration of the network.

Repositioning of reusable containers in a sustainable global supply chain environment

This research is motivated by the analysis of typical transportation and inventory management problems encountered by a global maritime carrier. Nearly 80% of the world's imported products move by ships transporting containers between ports. A major problem revolves around repositioning empty reusable containers within a global network of ports after the product arrives at its final destination. One major source of complexity arises due to imbalances of demand and supply for empty containers in each port. Our ongoing work with firms across other industries such as breakfast cereal manufacturers, baby food manufacturers, large grocers and personal care products manufacturers revealed a similar set of issues related to managing the availability and usage of reusable containers and pallets between shippers, their customers, port operators and the container/pallet leasing companies. This paper develops managerial insights related to the management and repositioning of empty reusable container inventory. We integrate the simulation approach for modelling the system details and analytical methods for describing the trade-offs among returns, receipts and container inventory performance. Our results provide a unique set of insights for port operations in primarily importing countries versus primarily exporting countries in a global supply chain environment.

Narcopolis Noir: Traffic in La Reina del Sur by Arturo Pérez-Reverte

While noir cityscapes traditionally refer to the metropolis as the structuring agent of plot, narrative, and discourse, Arturo Pérez-Reverte's novel, La reina del sur (2002), describes twenty-first-century space as elastic, fractured, and post-metropolitan. Edward W. Soja names this phenomenon Exopolis in his examination of Los Angeles. My study uses Soja's model to describe the coast of Spain, Gibraltar — the Rock and the Strait — and the coastal towns of North Africa as a network of cities, villages, ports, beaches, and waters bleeding into each other, blurring national and continental boundaries, ultimately creating a geography forever shifting. Illegal traffic has an impact on economic structures, political alliances, immigration, and contraband, positing a drug-commerce metaphor as a method of subversion and a space for personal reinvention. Not only is the detective-reporter-narrator simultaneously unravelling and reconstructing Teresa Mendoza's story, he is travelling the world to do so. What he discovers is a Mexican-born woman who has forged a self that accommodates postmodern instability by constant transformation. She is both present and absent, substantial and dissolving. She is woman, immigrant, mestiza, and as other, she participates in the body-politic of the Exopolis by feeding it the narcotic it demands.

Old Dominion, Industrial Commonwealth: Coal, Politics, and Economy in Antebellum America

In 1796, famed engineer and architect Benjamin Henry Latrobe toured the coal fields outside Richmond, Virginia, declaring enthusiastically, Such a mine of Wealth exists, I believe, nowhere else! With its abundant and accessible deposits, growing industries, and network of rivers and ports, Virginia stood poised to serve as the center of the young nation's coal trade. By the middle of the nineteenth century, however, Virginia's leadership in the American coal industry had completely unraveled while Pennsylvania, at first slow to exploit its vast reserves of anthracite and bituminous coal, had become the country's leading producer. Sean Patrick Adams compares the political economies of coal in Virginia and Pennsylvania from the late eighteenth century through the Civil War, examining the divergent paths these two states took in developing their ample coal reserves during a critical period of American industrialization. In both cases, Adams finds, state economic policies played a major role. Virginia's failure to exploit the rich coal fields in the western part of the state can be traced to the legislature's overriding concern to protect and promote the interests of the agrarian, slaveholding elite of eastern Virginia. Pennsylvania's more factious legislature enthusiastically embraced a policy of economic growth that resulted in the construction of an extensive transportation network, a statewide geological survey, and support for private investment in its coal fields. Using coal as a barometer of economic change, Old Dominion, Industrial Commonwealth addresses longstanding questions about North-South economic divergence and the role of state government in American industrial development, providing new insights for both political and economic historians of nineteenth-century America.

The evolution of a regional container port system: the Pearl River Delta

This study investigates the progress of container port system development in South China, focusing particularly on the interplay between Hong Kong and the other ports in the Pearl River Delta (PRD) region. After identifying the downgrading trend of Hong Kong from a transshipment hub port for Asia and for China as a whole to a regional load center and the emergence of other deep-sea direct-service ports, the paper looks into the causes of this structural change of the port system. Four major causes are identified: the cost-base competition, the impact of the unique “one-country two-systems” policy, the impact of globalization and container standardization, and the impact of multi-modal accessibility and connectivity. The paper reveals that the interplay between different governments and between the governments and port operators are the local mechanisms that together as a whole respond to the shippers’ needs and the shipping lines’ pressure. It confirms that the interdependencies and competitive relations between terminals are being played out at a regional level. While the particular situation of the PRD is unique in many regards, the features emerging there, with its dominant hub, its network of feeder ports and its emerging direct-service non-hub terminals, are being replicated elsewhere.

Investigation of density-dependent gas advection of trichloroethylene: Experiment and a model validation exercise

An experiment was conducted to evaluate whether vapor-density effects are significant in transporting volatile organic compounds (VOC's) with high vapor pressure and molecular mass through the subsurface. Trichloroethylene (TCE) was chosen for the investigation because it is a common VOC contaminant with high vapor pressure and molecular mass. For the investigation, a 2-m-long by 1-m-high by 7.5-cm-thick flow cell was constructed with a network of sampling ports. The flow cell was packed with sand, and a water table was established near the lower boundary. Liquid TCE was placed near the upper boundary of the flow cell in a chamber from which vapors could enter and migrate through the sand. TCE concentrations in the gas phase were measured by extracting 25-μl gas samples with an air-tight syringe and analyzing them with a gas chromatograph. The evolution of the TCE gas plume in the sand was investigated by examining plots of TCE concentrations over the domain for specific times and for particular locations as a function of time. To help in this analysis, a numerical model was developed that can predict the simultaneous movements of a gas, a nonaqueous liquid and water in porous media. The model also considers interphase mass transfer by employing the phase equilibrium assumption. The model was tested with one- and two-dimensional analytical solutions of fluid flow before it was used to simulate the experiment. Comparisons between experimental data and simulation results when vapor-density effects are considered were very good. When vapor-density effects were ignored, agreement was poor. These analyses suggest that vapor-density effects should be considered and that density-driven vapor advection may be an important mechanism for moving VOC's with high vapor pressures and molecular mass through the subsurface.

Routing Container Ships Using Lagrangean Relaxation and Decomposition

International shipping is a multibillon dollar business and shipping companies may expect large benefits from improving the routing and scheduling processes of their ships. In this paper, we describe a container-ship routing scenario in which a shipping company provides services to a network of ports. We formulate a mathematical programming model that maximizes total profit (i.e., revenue minus operating costs) for multiple ships and determines: (a) the optimal sequence of ports of call for each ship, (b) the number of trips each ship makes in a planning horizon, and (c) the amount of cargo transported between any two ports by each ship. The model contains discrete, 0–1 and continuous variables, and nonlinear complicating constraints. The multiple container ship model is quite different from those of vehicle routing and traveling salesman problems. We use a decomposition method for the model as well as for the network in order to solve the problem. Several problems on 10- to 20-port networks are solved and the results presented.

Persians, Pilgrims and Portuguese: The Travails of Masulipatnam Shipping in the Western Indian Ocean, 1590–1665

The Coromandel port of Masulipatnam, at the northern extremity of the Krishna delta, rose to prominence as a major centre of maritime trade in the last quarter of the sixteenth century. Its growing importance after about 1570 is explicable in terms of two sets of events: first, the consolidation of the Sultanate of Golkonda under Ibrahim Qutb Shah (r. 1550–1580), and second, the rise within the Bay of Bengal of a network of ports with a distinctly anti-Portuguese character, including the Sumatran centre of Aceh, the ports of lower Burma, of Arakan, as well as Masulipatnam itself. Round about 1550, Masulipatnam was no more than a supplier of textiles on the coastal network to the great port of Pulicat further south, but by the early 1580s its links with Pegu and Aceh had grown considerably, causing not a little alarm in the upper echelons of the administration of the Portuguese Estado da Índia at Goa. The ‘Moors’ who owned and operated ships out of Masulipatnam did so without the benefit of carlazes from the Portuguese captains either at São Tomé or at any other neighbouring port, and while developing an intense trade within the Bay of Bengal, strictly avoided the Portuguese-controlled entrepot at Melaka. The Portuguese in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries were heavily involved in it in western India and a recent study has marshalled evidence from Portuguese sources on the mechanics of that trade in a port on the Kanara coast.2 In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with the entry into the Indian Ocean of the large Chartered Companies, evidence on the grain trade is substantially increased, enabling us to see it in sharper focus in the broad canvas of Asian trade. the port was no more than a minor nuisance, and in the engagements that ensued, the Portuguese frequently had the worst of it, subsequently negotiating to recover prisoners lodged at Masulipatnam or at the court in Golkonda.2 However, by about 1590, the tenor of the relationship between the viceregal administration at Goa and the court at Golkonda had begun to show signs of change