Abstract
The opening of the Northern Sea Route (NSR) provides an alternative in connecting Asia and Europe. We evaluate the impact of the NSR on tramp shipping through a two-stage stochastic programming model featuring tramp ship routing and scheduling with uncertain cargo availability. Decisions regarding deterministic cargoes with known availability are made in the first stage and decisions regarding spot cargoes and detailed routing and scheduling plans are made in the second stage when the available spot cargoes are revealed. We solve the problem by Sample Average Approximation. The case study shows that the introduction of the NSR leads to an increase in gross margin. It allows picking up more cargoes or picking up cargoes with higher revenues. The advantages of the NSR are more obvious when the bunker price increases. The effect of the NSR on tramp ship routing decisions depends on the region. The effect is most significant for transportation between Northern Asia and Northern Europe, while less interesting to Southern Asia. In general, the NSR is more favored than the Suez Canal Route for both transporting cargoes and repositioning vessels.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Christiansen, M., Fagerholt, K.: Ship routing and scheduling in industrial and tramp shipping. In: Toth, P., Vigo, D. (eds.) Vehicle Routing: Problems, Methods, and Applications, 2nd edn., pp. 381–408. SIAM–Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, Philadelphia (2014). https://doi.org/10.1137/1.9781611973594
Christiansen, M., Fagerholt, K., Nygreen, B., Ronen, D.: Maritime transportation. Handbooks Oper. Res. Manag. Sci. 14, 189–284 (2007)
Fagerholt, K., Lindstad, H.: Turborouter: an interactive optimisation-based decision support system for ship routing and scheduling. Maritime Econ. Logist. 9(3), 214–233 (2007)
Furuichi, M., Otsuka, N.: Proposing a common platform of shipping cost analysis of the northern sea route and the Suez canal route. Maritime Econ. Logist. 17(1), 9–31 (2015)
Kleywegt, A.J., Shapiro, A., Homem-de Mello, T.: The sample average approximation method for stochastic discrete optimization. SIAM J. Optim. 12(2), 479–502 (2002)
Macrotrends. https://www.macrotrends.net/. Accessed 13 Feb 2019
Propulsion trends in bulk carriers. https://marine.man-es.com/docs/librariesprovider6/test/propulsion-trends-in-bulk-carriers.pdf?sfvrsn=7ff3dda2_8. Accessed 22 Apr 2020
Meng, Q., Zhang, Y., Xu, M.: Viability of transarctic shipping routes: a literature review from the navigational and commercial perspectives. Marit. Policy Manag. 44(1), 16–41 (2017)
Milaković, A.S., et al.: Current status and future operational models for transit shipping along the northern sea route. Marine Policy 94, 53–60 (2018)
Pache, H., Kastner, M., Jahn, C.: Current state and trends in tramp ship routing and scheduling. In: Digital Transformation in Maritime and City Logistics: Smart Solutions for Logistics. Proceedings of the Hamburg International Conference of Logistics (HICL), Vol. 28. pp. 369–394. epubli GmbH, Berlin (2019)
Schøyen, H., Bråthen, S.: The northern sea route versus the Suez canal: cases from bulk shipping. J. Transp. Geogr. 19(4), 977–983 (2011)
Sea distances. https://sea-distances.org/. Accessed 2 Apr 2019
Tolls calculator. https://www.suezcanal.gov.eg/English/Tolls/Pages/TollsCalculator.aspx. Accessed 2 Apr 2019
Icebreaker assistance value calculating. http://www.nsra.ru/en/ledokolnaya_i_ledovaya_lotsmanskaya_provodka/raschet_stoimosti_ledokolnoy_provodki_v_akvatorii_smp.html. Accessed 2 Apr 2019
Theocharis, D., Pettit, S., Rodrigues, V.S., Haider, J.: Arctic shipping: a systematic literature review of comparative studies. J. Transp. Geogr. 69, 112–128 (2018)
United Nations Conference on Trade and Development: Review of Maritime Transport 2019. UN Publications (2019)
Vilhelmsen, C., Larsen, J., Lusby, R.M.: Tramp ship routing and scheduling-models, methods and opportunities. DTU Management Engineering (2015)
Vilhelmsen, C., Lusby, R., Larsen, J.: Tramp ship routing and scheduling with integrated bunker optimization. EURO J. Transp. Logist. 3(2), 143–175 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13676-013-0039-8
Yu, B., Wang, K., Wang, C., Yao, B.: Ship scheduling problems in tramp shipping considering static and spot cargoes. Int. J. Shipp. Transp. Logist. 9(4), 391–416 (2017)
Zhu, S., Fu, X., Ng, A.K., Luo, M., Ge, Y.E.: The environmental costs and economic implications of container shipping on the northern sea route. Marit. Policy Manag. 45(4), 456–477 (2018)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Li, M., Fagerholt, K., Schütz, P. (2020). Analyzing the Impact of the Northern Sea Route on Tramp Ship Routing with Uncertain Cargo Availability. In: Lalla-Ruiz, E., Mes, M., Voß, S. (eds) Computational Logistics. ICCL 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12433. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59747-4_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59747-4_5
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-59746-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-59747-4
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)