Qingcheng Zeng

Dalian Maritime University · Shcool of Maritime Economics and Management

ARTICLE INFO Keywords: Freight rate volatility spillovers, Shipping markets, Maritime supply chains, Alliances and acquisitions, Time and frequency domain. ABSTRACT. The purpose of this paper is to analyze and understand how the infamous fluctuations in freight rates influence (spill over) upstream (shipper and ship-manufacturing) and downstream...

Blockchain technology promotes the efficiency and transparency of the shipping supply chain, presenting new opportunities and challenges for various maritime stakeholders. To enhance the application of blockchain in the shipping industry, a vertical game model is constructed, involving a port and a shipping company (SP), to analyze the roles of mar...

Under the mounting pressure to make changes to become more environmentally friendly and sustainable, port authorities have been exploring effective solutions to reduce CO2 emissions. In this regard, alternative fuels, innovative technology, and optimization strategies are key pathways for ports to transition toward a low-carbon pattern. In this rev...

Purpose Magnet spot is the primary method to develop the automated guided vehicle (AGV) guidance system for many automated container terminals (ACT). Aiming to improve the high flexibility of AGV operation in ACT, this paper aims to address the problem of technical stability leading to ACT production paralysis and propose a mini-terminal AGV robot...

Global shipping alliances have become an important institution in international seaborne trade. Their raison d’être is higher efficiency and lower costs, to the benefit of the consumer. However, experiences from GSA operations during the COVID-19 supply chain crisis show that GSAs may have considerable market power, not quite aligned with the spiri...

With increased investment in automated container terminals (ACTs), research on the design method for ACT infrastructure becomes popular. However, the performance of the ACT infrastructure design scheme is subject to the coordination and interaction of the container handling system in different design layouts and dynamic environments. The traditiona...

E-commerce is a typical form of retail digitalization that introduces online uncertainty and product returns. To decrease the negative influence of online uncertainty, the largest Chinese e-commerce company, the Alibaba Group, invited an insurance company to develop return-freight insurance (RFI), a new kind of insurance, to compensate for consumer...

The background and contents of the Special Issue (SI) of “Integration and Cooperation in International Transportation” are summarized. The aim of the SI is the attraction and presentation of high-quality papers concerning this topic. “COOPERATION” and “INTEGRATION” are two promising topics of the published 8 papers. The beneficiaries of SI include...

In this paper, we focus on the two crossover automated stacking cranes (ASCs) scheduling problem that arises at a storage block in an automated container terminal. To address relocation during retrieval operations, we use two methods with job precedence constraints: (1) adjusting the operation sequence of jobs to avoid relocation operations and (2)...

We investigate the evolution of the container port system of the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area (GBA), better known as Pearl River Delta (PRD). We analyze the economic drivers that over the years have shaped port development in one of the world's most dynamic regions, embracing three of the world's busiest container ports: Shenzhen, Hon...

The efficiency of automated container terminals primarily depends on the automated guided vehicle (AGV) scheduling scheme. This paper investigates the AGV dispatching and routing problem with multiple bidirectional paths to generate conflict-free routes. A mixed-integer programming (MIP) model is formulated to minimize the completion time of all jo...

The coastal intermodal cargo-container joint supply chain is a complicated system with several stakeholders and a few challenging decision-making concerns, such as the laden container acceptance and routing problem, the empty container relocation problem, and the water transportation services pricing problem. Motivated by the abovementioned backgro...

The Intelligent Transportation System under Digital Twins can provide accurate data sources for traffic control. The present work focuses on the real-time information processing and task scheduling problems of the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) system based on Virtual Reality. They are the Quality/Distance Algorithm (QDA), Task Density Algorithm, Dista...

Most studies that address the integration of active modes (i.e., walking and bicycling) and public transit tend to focus on either transfer distance or feeder mode choice. Few articles have reported the relationships between the built environment (D-variables) and transfer patterns (e.g., transfer distance and mode choice) in a single study. Furthe...

The running path of automated guided vehicles (AGVs) in the automated terminal is affected by the storage location of containers and the running time caused by congestion, deadlock and other problems during the driving process is uncertain. In this paper, considering the different AGVs congestion conditions along the path, a symmetric triangular fu...

Green container terminals have gained much attention to satisfy the demand for sustainable and environmentally friendly transport. As one of the major polluters in container terminals, rubber-tyred gantry cranes have already been widely replaced by electric rubber-tyred gantry cranes (ERTGs). This article exploits the features of ERTGs and studies...

Due to the repeated bearing of mechanical operations and natural factors, the container will suffer various types of damage during use. Adopting effective container damage detection methods plays a vital role in prolonging the service life and using function. This paper proposes a multitype damage detection model for containers based on transfer le...

As governments of various countries attach importance to green transportation, governments have focused their attention to understanding how they can shift the cargo shipping in coastal areas from land to water. Motivated by this, this paper establishes a green policy design model for coastal transportation systems. The model aims to minimise the c...

The flourishing development of e-commerce technologies has fostered the rapid development of shipping e-commerce, which has a huge development potential especially in the case of the great impact of COVID-19 on the container shipping industry. Shipping e-commerce is characterized by ensuring that the transportation contract is completed on time. Wh...

The quantity of electrical coal transported through the tramp shipping network is increasing due to the high demands. This trend has increased the scheduling difficulty combined with the underdevelopment of the private thermal power plant port. The high coal consumption and low port storage capacity requires the scheduling of the tramp ship to be o...

The construction industry is undergoing a digital revolution due to the emergence of new technologies. A significant trend is that construction projects have been transformed and upgraded to the digital and smart mode in the whole life cycle. As a critical technology for the construction industry's innovative development, building information model...

We regret that one of the author’s names (Qingcheng Zeng) was misspelt in the original version of the article and the order in which the authors appeared was incorrect.

This paper investigates the Stochastic Container Relocation Problem in which a flexible service policy is adopted in the import container retrieval process. The flexible policy allows the terminal operators to determine the container retrieval sequence to some extent, which provides more opportunity for reducing the number of relocations and the tr...

A significant bottleneck in port regionalization through multimodal transport chains is expensive and time-consuming inland transport. To be competitive, it is crucial for a port authority to build an effective transport system and develop collection-distribution abilities. Considering shipper preferences, this study proposes a pricing model to des...

This paper discusses three types of relationship modes between a container terminal yard and a remote container yard. Considering the variability of demand, a corresponding storage pricing model based on game theory for inbound containers is developed to describe customer behaviour and pricing strategies of yards. The results of theoretical derivat...

One of the advantages of Arctic shipping or the Northern Sea Route (NSR) over the traditional Suez Canal Route (SCR) is its comparatively shorter transport distance between the Atlantic and the Pacific, which makes North East Asia and North Europe seemingly closer geographically and economically. The economic development of the North-East Asia brin...

During the last three decades, technological innovations in cargo handling equipment have made it possible to automate operational processes in container terminals. Despite the increasing trend in terminal automation, little work has been done to develop theoretical guidelines for evaluating the benefits of this industrial practice. We assess termi...

In this paper, a bi-level programming model is established to solve the decision problem of the departure port tax rebate policy (DPTRP). Based on the theory of user equilibrium, the model can optimize the selection of inland port (or domestic trade port) to implement the DPTRP with the goal of maximizing total generalized transportation cost under...

The cruise service supply chain is integrated with cruise lines and cruise ship service suppliers to provide the seamless transition and to enhance the best possible customer experiences. Due to the short resupply window for the cruise ship and possible conflicts of self-interests with suppliers, it is crucial for cruise lines to establish the long...

Water transport is an important way to reduce carbon emissions in a coastal transportation system (CTS). With the goal of minimizing government financial expenditures, this paper establishes a CTS joint taxation-subsidy emission reduction policy optimization model. This model is able to optimize the government’s tax and subsidy policy implementatio...

Truck appointment has proved to be an efficient tool in reducing congestion at container terminals. To make a reasonable appointment quota plan, it is necessary to take terminal operations into consideration. We develop a novel approach (model) for optimizing a truck appointment system with the objective of decreasing external trucks’ waiting times...

This paper focuses on the overall handling efficiency and the system’s stability of container terminals with double cycling. A closed queuing network is used to model terminal operations, and theoretical upper and lower bounds of the system performance is obtained to show the maximum service availability of the terminals. The generally distributed...

This paper addresses issues of cruise home port competition based on the cruise supply chain. A pricing model of the cruise market is developed considering the competitive cooperation behaviors of the participants in the cruise supply chain. Furthermore, a model of cruise home port competition is developed to investigate the impacts of subsidy part...

To reduce the rehandling of inbound containers given partial truck arrival information, a method of simultaneously optimizing the pickup sequence and the container rehandling strategy is proposed. A rehandling model that considers adjustments to the container pickup sequence within each group is developed to minimize the total number of rehandles....

Purpose In the USA, the cruise industry has generated more than $42bn in total economic activities, involving over 356,000 jobs. The largest and most aggressive operator is acknowledged as Carnival Cruise Line (CCL), with a 48.3 per cent market share including all subsidiary companies in 2013. CCL has had a strong track record of reliability and h...

Purpose Regardless of the facts showing a booming Chinese cruise market, cruise operations in China are very different from the current practices of the two major cruise markets – the US and the Mediterranean Sea. This study aims to quantify pricing strategies and possible incentive mechanisms of cruise operations in China. Design/methodology/app...

Different modes of governance will certainly have different impacts on the development of the inland waterway network and inland shipping economy on the Yangtze River and Pearl River in China. The inland waterway transport (IWT) economy on both rivers has recently been considered part of the national economic strategy, and it is necessary to analyz...

Direct transshipment is a new mode in the transshipment of containers, whereby a part of transshipment containers are directly loaded onto mother vessels from feeder vessels, instead of being buffered in the storage yard. To implement it efficiently, several decision issues need to be addressed, one of which is berth allocation and storage space as...

In this paper, issues regarding the vertical integration of a cruise supply chain are addressed. Decentralized and centralized pricing models for the revenue distribution of a cruise supply chain consisting of a travel agency, a cruise company and a cruise port were developed. The results indicate that whereas the profit level under centralized pri...

A mixed storage strategy was proposed to improve the efficiency of yard operations and horizontal transportation to corporate with quay crane double cycling. The effects of the mixed storage strategy on terminal operations, including truck travel distance, yard crane operations and the number of required trucks, were analyzed. An approach based on...

To increase the double cycling efficiency of quay cranes and yard cranes and decrease the unloaded distance of trucks, this paper proposed a mixed storage strategy in container yard. With the objective of minimizing moving time and rehandling time of yard cranes, a loading sequence optimization model for export containers is developed to increase d...

In this article, a method based on empirical mode decomposition (EMD) and artificial neural networks (ANN) is developed for Baltic Dry Index (BDI) forecasting. The original BDI series is decomposed into several independent intrinsic mode functions (IMFs) using EMD first. Then the IMFs are composed into three components: short-term fluctuations, eff...

In this article, a method based on empirical mode decomposition (EMD) and BEKK–Multivariate GARCH (MVGARCH) is developed to analyse the volatility of the tanker freight market. First, the initial time series of tanker freight rates is decomposed into several independent intrinsic mode functions (IMFs). Next, the IMFs are composed as three component...

The liner shipping industry has been characterised by a greater concentration after the advent of new shipping alliance policies: Ocean Three and 2M. The Modified Shapley model and the core theory are proposed to investigate the profit share and the stable operation of alliances. The results have revealed that: (i) a more reasonable profit distribu...

The liner shipping industry has been characterised by a greater concentration after the advent of new shipping alliance policies: Ocean Three and 2M. The Modified Shapley model and the core theory are proposed to investigate the profit share and the stable operation of alliances. The results have revealed that: (i) a more reasonable profit distribu...

In container terminals, the planned berth schedules often have to be revised because of disruptions caused by severe weather, equipment failures, technical problems and other unforeseen events. In this paper, the problem of berth schedule recovery is addressed to reduce the influences caused by disruptions. A multi-objective, multi-stage model is d...

Dual cycling is an operation technique whereby quay cranes perform loading and unloading operations simultaneously in the same ship bay. In this article, a mixed-integer programming model for quay crane dual-cycling scheduling is developed. The model considers the stowage plan of outbound containers and the operation sequence of quay cranes. To sol...

A time charter contract is a shipping contract that allows for freight rate risk avoidance and hedging. Defining the relationship between time charter and spot freight rates will illuminate the fluctuation mechanism of the spot freight market. In this article, three types of dry bulk ships – Capsize, Panamax and Supramax – are chosen to investigate...

In this paper, a methodology based on Bayesian Network (BN) was proposed to deal with the difficulty of risk analysis in RoPax transport. Based on data collection and expert survey, BN model for RoPax sailing risk analysis was constructed first. Then the Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm for parameter learning and Evidence Prepropagation Impo...

Many ports are facing heavy truck congestion in the terminal, which leads to longer truck waiting time and lower operation efficiency. To alleviate congestion and decrease truck turn time in the container terminal, an optimization model for truck appointment was proposed in this paper. In the model, the appointment quota of each period was optimize...

In order to solve the difficulty in simulation and prediction the evolution of oil spill incidents in port water area caused by system complexity and environment variety, a simulation model based on Dynamic Data-Driven Application System (DDDAS) was developed. By assimilating real-time data, simulation model can update its initial condition and sol...

The bulk shipping market is seasonal, cyclical and highly volatile. Due to the nonstationary and nonlinear nature of price series and the complexity of influencing factors, it is difficult to analyse the fluctuations in the bulk shipping market. In this study, a method based on empirical mode decomposition (EMD) is proposed to investigate the volat...

As coastal production costs in China rise, producers are moving inland to remain competitive with other Asian countries. As a result, Chinese sea ports are rapidly developing dry (i.e., inland) ports to compete for hinterland access. Yet the growing body of research examining dry ports has yet to analyze China. This article fills this gap by combin...

This paper focuses on the optimization of operation scheduling in container terminals based on mix cross-operation. Mix cross-operation is a scheduling method which allows yard trailers to be shared by different yard cranes in different berths to decrease yard trailers’ travel distance. An integrating scheduling model that optimizes the three key a...

Aiming at the relations among several links such as berth distribution, loading operation and unloading operation and horizontal handling in the import and export operation system of container terminal, the effect of existed import and export operation system on the production efficiency and operation cost of container terminal was analyzed. By usi...

In this paper, a model for optimizing bus route headway is presented in a given network configuration and demand matrix, which aims to find an acceptable balance between passenger costs and operator costs, namely the maximization of service quality and the minimization of operational costs. An integrated approach is also proposed in the paper to de...

The objective of operation scheduling in container terminals is to determine a schedule that minimizes time for loading or unloading a given set of containers. This paper presents a method integrating reinforcement learning and simulation to optimize operation scheduling in container terminals. The introduced method uses a simulation model to const...

This article addresses the problem of recovering berth and quay crane (QC) schedules in container terminals when disruptions occur after a subset of operations has been processed. Firstly, models for simultaneous optimization of berth and QC schedules are developed. Then, two strategies, namely, QC rescheduling strategy and berth reallocation strat...

In this paper, the problems of the external logistics system design of the Western Taiwan Straits Economic Zone are studied. Firstly, the external logistics network is designed. The network includes the main road, railway and logistics node (e.g. sea port, container freight station, railway freight station and dry port etc.) in the Western Taiwan S...

In this paper, the disruption management problem of berth allocation is studied to deal with the unforeseen disruptions in container terminals. A berth alloca-tion model considering the scheduling of quay crane is developed first. Then a disruption management model is developed to recover the berth schedule when unexpected events happen, and simula...

In order to solve the difficult problem that unexpected events, which may make the original schedule infeasible, occur occasionally in container terminals, a disruption management model for berth and quay crane scheduling was developed by the methodology of disruption management. This model measured disruptions from three aspects: Operation cost, v...

The operating efficiency of container shipping lines depends on proper resource allocation of container shipping. A deterministic model was developed for shipping lines based on the equilibrium principle. The objective was to optimize the resource allocation for container lines considering ship size, container deployment, and slot allocation. The d...

This paper focuses on the optimization of container shipping network and its operations under changing cargo demand and freight rates. The problem is formulated as a mixed integer non-linear programming problem (MINP) with an objective of maximizing the average unit ship-slot profit at three stages using analytical methodology. The issues such as e...

To improve the operation efficiency of container terminal, a scheduling model of integrating loading and unloading operations was developed. By using the model quay cranes could perform loading and unloading operations simultaneously in same ship-bay. The objective of the model was to minimize the operation times of quay cranes and yard cranes by o...

In this paper, a method integrating Q-learning algorithm and simulation technique is proposed to optimize the operation scheduling in container terminals. Firstly Q-learning algorithms for yard cranes and yard trailers are designed to obtain the optimal scheduling strategy of yard cranes and yard trailers. Then Q-learning is combined with simulatio...

“Multi-crane oriented” is a scheduling method that yard trailers can be shared by different quay cranes. In this paper, two models for this problem are developed. The first one is a model for an inter-ship-based sharing method. In this model, yard trailers can be shared by quay cranes of different ships. To solve the model, a two-phase Tabu search...

In this paper, a simulation optimization method for scheduling loading operations in container terminals is developed. The method integrates the intelligent decision mechanism of optimization algorithm and evaluation function of simulation model, its procedures are: initializing container sequence according to certain dispatching rule, then improvi...

Authors presented the bus arrival time prediction model based on support vector machine (SVM) and Kalman filter technique. The SVM which had three input features including: Time-of-day, weather and segment was used to predict the baseline of bus running time from historical trip data. Applying the newest bus running information, combined with basel...

The problem of assignment and scheduling of yard trailers to quay cranes was discussed. A dynamic scheduling model for yard trailers was developed so as to minimize the waiting time of quay cranes. A Q-learning algorithm was also designed to develop decision-making policy for selecting the appropriate dispatching rules in different states. Also, a...

In this paper, optimization of container line under uncertainty was discussed. Firstly, a deterministic model for the problem was developed according to the characteristics and requirement of container line, the model considered ship deployment, slot allocation, and empty container reposition simultaneously. Secondly, a robust optimization model fo...

According to the characteristics and requirements of container shipping line, the equilibrium principle for container line is proposed to efficiently utilize the capital in container line. The model for container slot allocation reflecting the principle is developed. Meanwhile, the pendulum shipping line is given as an example in numerical experime...

In this paper, an integrated optimization model is developed to improve the efficiency of coal shipping. The objective is (1) to determine the types of ships and the number of each type, (2) to optimize the ship routing, therefore, to minimize the total coal shipping cost. Meanwhile, an algorithm based on two-phase tabu search is designed to solve...

In order to improve the unloading efficiency of container wharf, a integrated optimization model of storage location and yard trailer scheduling was developed, and a two-phase tabu search (TS) algorithm was designed to solve the model. In the first phase, a TS was performed to determine a good storage location scheme. In the second phase, for each...