This paper presents the results of an empirical study conducted by distributing questionnaires to shipping agents working for foreign principals in Karachi, Pakistan. In Part A of the questionnaire, respondents gave a score reflecting the importance of 13 factors affecting terminal selection....

Oil companies are gradually becoming more focused on optimizing their upstream logistics. However, little research regarding upstream logistics has been published. We argue that more research would be beneficial and that more attention must be given to one of the largest cost elements in the...

This article focuses on an intermodal freight transport service in which containers represent the moved loading units. In particular, it deals with the advantages of combining sea and road transportation – sea for transferring large quantities over long distances, road for collecting and...

The studies investigating the port selection process had one thing in common: they analyse the declared preferences of the port agents. However, it is difficult to identify the relevant variables in this process because of the heterogeneity of this group. In this article, we suggest to study the...

In Italy, the concessions of port terminals to stevedoring companies are currently governed by the 84/1994 law; notwithstanding Port Authorities have some discretion in charging and defining the fees. As a result, the way concessions fees are charged is not efficient and this will not provide...

In this work we describe some decisional problems arising in the management of maritime container ports, together with optimisation models and algorithms suitably designed for their solution. We refer to the Gioia Tauro container terminal which recently has reached a high stage of growth,...

In this work, we are looking at the problem of determining stowage plans for containerships. This problem, denoted in the literature as the Master Bay Plan Problem (MBPP), is computationally difficult to solve, that is NP-hard. We start from the optimal solution of subsets of bays related to...

Maritime container terminals are playing a growing role within global transport chains. As intermodal nodes between sea traffic flows and inland distribution, they are very important to shipping lines. The current trend of moving towards economies of scale in regard to mother vessels is also...

The increase in efficiency of container terminals is addressed via an approach based on the optimisation of logistics operations. Toward this end, a discrete-time dynamic model of the various flows of containers that are inter-modally routed from arriving carriers to carriers ready for departure...