Paul Tae-Woo Lee

Modelling port choice in an uncertain environment

Port choice is an important issue to be investigated to ensure the effective integration of container supply chains and the sustainable development of regional economy. The selection of appropriate ports to facilitate shipping activities and international trade is crucial for many stakeholders, including shipping lines, port administrators, cargo shippers and national governments. The task is essentially a process of multiple criterion decision-making (MCDM) under uncertainty, requiring analysts to derive rational decisions from uncertain and incomplete data related to different quantitative and qualitative determinants. This paper aims at proposing a new conceptual port choice method by explaining the role fuzzy logic in evidential reasoning in a complementary way, in which various forms of raw data (either objective or subjective) collected to evaluate port performance can first be converted into and presented as fuzzy grades defined using linguistics terms with degrees of belief (DoBs) and second be combined using evidential reasoning to produce a port choice preference score. The method is applied to analyse the selection of major Northeast Asian (NEA) container ports from a shipping line’s perspective. The outcome, a port choice preference score, is calculated using evidential reasoning to directly synthesize the true estimation of the port with respect to each criterion and therefore, unlike a relative ranking index, keeps the ‘goodness’ of port evaluation, capable of benchmarking a specific port’s performance and monitoring the increase of its competitiveness in a longitude study with respect to an individual criterion or all the criteria as a whole.

A comparative study on financial positions of shipping companies in Taiwan and Korea using entropy and grey relation analysis

The international trade of Korea and Taiwan has been heavily dependent upon international seatransportation owing to geo-political aspects. Therefore, the two countries have exerted to develop and promote ocean-going shipping industry in order to support their economies. Recent financial crisis in together with the economic slowdown has reduced seaborne trade cargoes, which resulted in remarkably deteriorated revenues of the container shipping sector. Major container shipping companies of both countries such as Evergreen, Yang Ming, Hyundai, and Hanjin under our study are no exception. This paper intends to achieve two-fold aims. The first applies entropy to find the relative weights of financial ratios of the four companies each year. In so doing, we can find the weights variance for the period of 1999-2009 based on the financial performance of the above companies. The second is to rank the companies in the period by grey relation analysis. On the basis of findings in this paper, we suggest business policy implications to mitigate impacts of the financial tsunami in the context of world shipping area.

Charting a New Paradigm of Container Hub Port Development Policy: The Asian Doctrine

This paper proposes the conceptual model of the Asian (Port) Doctrine to explain the successful development of top ranking container ports in Asia during the past four decades. This paper draws a new paradigm for the role of government as a third governance approach in addition to Anglo-Saxon and European doctrines by describing how Asian countries have developed container hub ports by investing in infrastructure as social overhead capital to support export-led growth. We survey characteristics and outcomes in major Asian container port developments and one European port in terms of a port development policy. The findings are presented in a comparative overview of government investment in functional elements of port, maritime infrastructure and landside connections to container ports. This paper confirms that the existing two doctrines—Anglo-Saxon and European doctrines—are not sufficient to explain the Asian success in major container port developments. The proposed framework contends that a newly proposed Asian Doctrine can accomplish this with the help of cross-subsidization, strategic and administered port pricing mechanism.

Applying analytic network process (ANP) to rank critical success factors of waterfront redevelopment

Waterfront redevelopment (WFD) is not only driven by several external forces such as changes of port function, conflicts between port authority and local government, environmental issues caused by port activities, and the bad public image of ports, but also coincides with an increasing consciousness and assertiveness by individuals in their consumption lifestyles. With attention on the conflicting demands and needs of WFD stakeholders and interdependence of their concerns, this paper applies an analytic network process (ANP) to rank the critical success factors of WFD by comparing the preferences of decision-makers and stakeholders. An efficient questionnaire is designed to compare analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and ANP. The questionnaire was dispatched to experts and stakeholders in WFD. For ANP results, the top five were connectivity, maritime clustering, transformation of port/city interface, accessibility, and port infrastructure, which were different from AHP outcomes. Case study research by the authors supports the results of ANP.

Estimation of Optimal Handling Capacity of a Container Port: An Economic Approach

Port planners have to make decisions on optimal berth capacity for container port development. The main purpose of this paper is twofold. One is to review the current practices adopted by selected major ports in Asia in estimating berth and port capacities in their planning decisions. The other is to suggest a new approach to estimate the optimal capacity of a berth/port from the perspective of a national economy and to show how the traditional approach can integrate economic factors. Findings suggest that port planners should look into incurring costs of not only the construction, but also the opportunity costs of ships and cargo when deciding to use port facilities to full capacity.

Optimising containership speed and fleet size under a carbon tax and an emission trading scheme

This paper addresses the problem of determining the ship speed, fleet size, and chartered ship number subject to environmental regulations consisting of a carbon tax and an emission trading scheme. The objective of the problem is to minimise bunker consumption cost, ship operating cost, ship charterage and either the carbon tax or the revenue/cost of selling/purchasing CO2 emissions permits. We formulate the problems as non-linear programmes by considering the two regulations independently. This study also suggests Lagrangian heuristics to solve the problems. A case study is performed to evaluate the applicability of the heuristics.

Container Port Competition and Competitiveness Analysis: Asian Major Ports

This chapter evaluates the competitive edge of major Asian container ports, i.e. Busan, Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Singapore ports, referring to the customer-centric community ports, so-called the Fifth Generation Ports, of which the concept has been modified for evaluation. The literature of competitiveness of container ports applied a number of methods, among others, including time series analysis, DEA and SFA methods, service quality analysis with importance-performance analysis and Kano model, multi-criteria evaluation, survey of container ship operators and logistics managers, shift-share analysis and diversification indexes such as Herfindahl–Hirschmann, marginal cost pricing approach, and game theory. The previous literature measured the relative competitiveness of ports in Asia and Europe. Such analysis results are useful to evaluate the competitiveness of container ports at the given evaluation angle at the given time. However, they do not consider port competitiveness in relation to port devolution according to a globalized economy with changes of production and distribution channels, technology, city-port interface, government policy, port users’ behavior, pricing, environmental issue, as well as security and safety. Having considered the above limitation in the literature, this chapter argues that a novel approach is required to evaluate inter-port competition in a comprehensive way to reflect cross-sectional, longitudinal and horizontal aspects of the port evolution. In this regard, it can be said that this novel approach, i.e. the Fifth Generation Ports, with empirical test by descriptive and quantitative methods contributes to port competition studies in the literature.

An advanced risk analysis approach for container port safety evaluation

Risk analysis in seaports plays an increasingly important role in ensuring port operation reliability, maritime transportation safety and supply chain distribution resilience. However, the task is not straightforward given the challenges, including that port safety is affected by multiple factors related to design, installation, operation and maintenance and that traditional risk assessment methods such as quantitative risk analysis cannot sufficiently address uncertainty in failure data. This paper develops an advanced Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA) approach through incorporating Fuzzy Rule-Based Bayesian Networks (FRBN) to evaluate the criticality of the hazardous events (HEs) in a container terminal. The rational use of the Degrees of Belief (DoB) in a fuzzy rule base (FRB) facilitates the implementation of the new method in Container Terminal Risk Evaluation (CTRE) in practice. Compared to conventional FMEA methods, the new approach integrates FRB and BN in a complementary manner, in which the former provides a realistic and flexible way to describe input failure information while the latter allows easy updating of risk estimation results and facilitates real-time safety evaluation and dynamic risk-based decision support in container terminals. The proposed approach can also be tailored for wider application in other engineering and management systems, especially when instant risk ranking is required by the stakeholders to measure, predict and improve their system safety and reliability performance.

Research trends and agenda on the Belt and Road (B&R) initiative with a focus on maritime transport

ABSTRACT The ‘Silk Road Economic Belt and the 21st-Century Maritime Silk Road’ (collectively known as Belt and Road, B&R) has been initiated by the Chinese government in 2013. The B&R is increasingly becoming a focal point for socio-economic–political interests because of its likely impact on land and sea transport and maritime logistics. The aims of this study were threefold: first, to provide an overview on the B&R, focusing on its key structural elements, such as transport corridors, city clusters, dry ports, infrastructure, zoning, and area development; second, to identify the expected impacts of the B&R on trade and implications on structural changes in transportation systems, port networks, and international logistics. Finally, to discuss major research trends and setting up of research agenda which will contribute to enriching the existing literature and shaping the global trade operations and drive economic growth in the context of the B&R.

A study of relative efficiency between privatised and publicly operated US ports

This study identifies and compares the financial performance of privatised ports with non-privatised ports using the stochastic frontier profit function and panel data regression analysis. The goal of privatisation is to improve capital utilisation, sharpen managerial incentives and reduce bureaucratic waste. Given the arguments in favour of private ownership, the question is whether privatised ports satisfy the expectation of higher profitability. US ports are unique compared to foreign counterparts, with organisational forms ranging from purely public to landlord to private. To assess relative efficiency, we obtain data from the Public Ports Finance Survey for the period 1997 to 2006. Our findings support the argument that private sector involvement has a positive impact on port efficiency in terms of its financial performance. When price of output, capital intensity, cost of labour and size are controlled for, we see greater profit margins in landlord ports.