The master thesis focuses at the pricing process of FCL shipments between Europe and Asia. After the general process description of internal processes there are shown two concrete examples, one under EXW condition and the other one under DAP condition. At the same time the thesis present also the railway connection between Asia and Europe as a certain alternative to the maritime and airfreight transportation under some condition.

This Master´s Thesis deals with the exportation of fast-moving consumer goods from Mexico. The theoretical part explains the concept of FMCG and describes the steps that should generally be followed when exporting FMCG from Mexico. Furthermore, the elements related to maritime transportation are described, because this type of transport of exporting from this country is used most often. Within the specific case of Corona, detailed logistics structure of the export process is displayed. By analysing its operation, the main challenges associated with carriers used for the export are identified and ultimately partial solutions that should be implemented to minimize the occurrence of problematic points are suggested.

This dissertation introduces three different topics on waterborne transportation. River transportation is a very important alternative for freight shipments in some countries. A significant portion of United States agricultural commodities transported via river barges. The lower portion of the Missouri River has been channelized to support barge traffic. Barge traffic has been used to move agricultural commodities to the Gulf of Mexico through Mississippi River to be exported overseas. Missouri River faced some weather issues such as drought in some years and flooding in others. Alternative transportation modes are important during the post-harvest period when the river has low-flow. The results showed a positive cost to agricultural freight in three years of a five years in dry period. In the other two years rail rates were estimated to be lower than barge rates. The second topic is using maritime distance to measure trade costs in agriculture. Maritime transportation holds an important position among other transportation means because it has some characteristics that others do not. Maritime shipping is critical to international trade because of the advantages that ships have by carry huge amounts of cargo for long distances. The impact of port-to-port maritime distance on US international trade to Europe and North and South America was tested. Unexpectedly result shows that trade increases with maritime distance. This impact decreases when the geographical distance is higher than the maritime distance. The third paper measures the efficiency and productivity of major Middle East container ports. Ports considered the main node to link the trading partners. The results indicate that eight ports out of 21 ports have low productivity. / Saudi Arabia Cultural Mission, USA / King Abdulaziz University / Faculty of Maritime Studies, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia

Background: In recent times, the maritime shipping industry has been facing several challenges due to higher shipping costs caused by delayed deliveries and underperformance damaging the relationship between operating companies and end-customers. Researchers have shown the potential usefulness of an integrated supply chain system as it helps improve business results and end-customer relationships. It has also been shown to have a tremendous impact on operational and financial performance. Purpose: This thesis aims to analyze supply chain integration in the maritime transport sector to improve end-customer relationships and performance. Particularly, the logistics and distribution in terms of preventing delays and increased prices. Method: This thesis is conducted as a case study at a Scandinavian international service provider company. Empirical data is collected through semi-structured interviews with employees within the company and their end-customers. Content analysis is used to create themes that clearly relate to research. Conclusion: The study shows that inefficiencies in the shipping service supply chain are due to lack of integration within logistics and distribution processes. Improvements of the operations to improve the lead time and the pricing in the supply chain are needed to reduce such gaps. As data have been collected from a single company and its end-customers, the analysis shows that all actors in the supply chain must act as a single entity and work for a unified goal, and more studies are needed to confirm the applicability of these results to other cases with similar conditions.

The primary aim of this thesis is to develop effective solution techniques for large-scale maritime inventory routing problems that possess a core substructure common in many real-world applications. We use the term “large-scale” to refer to problems whose standard mixed-integer linear programming (MIP) formulations involve tens of thousands of binary decision variables and tens of thousands of constraints and require days to solve on a personal computer. Although a large body of literature already exists for problems combining vehicle routing and inventory control for road-based applications, relatively little work has been published in the realm of maritime logistics. A major contribution of this research is in the advancement of novel methods for tackling problems orders of magnitude larger than most of those considered in the literature. Coordinating the movement of massive vessels all around the globe to deliver large quantities of high value products is a challenging and important problem within the maritime transportation industry. After introducing a core maritime inventory routing model to aid decision-makers with their coordination efforts, we make three main contributions. First, we present a two-stage algorithm that exploits aggregation and decomposition to produce provably good solutions to complex instances with a 60-period (two-month) planning horizon. Not only is our solution approach different from previous methods discussed in the maritime transportation literature, but computational experience shows that our approach is promising. Second, building on the recent successes of approximate dynamic programming (ADP) for road-based applications, we present an ADP procedure to quickly generate good solutions to maritime inventory routing problems with a long planning horizon of up to 365 periods. For instances with many ports (customers) and many vessels, leading MIP solvers often require hours to produce good solutions even when the planning horizon is limited to 90 periods. Our approach requires minutes. Our algorithm operates by solving many small subproblems and, in so doing, collecting and learning information about how to produce better solutions. Our final research contribution is a polyhedral study of an optimization problem that was motivated by maritime inventory routing, but is applicable to a more general class of problems. Numerous planning models within the chemical, petroleum, and process industries involve coordinating the movement of raw materials in a distribution network so that they can be blended into final products. The uncapacitated fixed-charge transportation problem with blending (FCTPwB) that we study captures a core structure encountered in many of these environments. We model the FCTPwB as a mixed-integer linear program and derive two classes of facets, both exponential in size, for the convex hull of solutions for the problem with a single consumer and show that they can be separated in polynomial time. Finally, a computational study demonstrates that these classes of facets are effective in reducing the integrality gap and solution time for more general instances of the FCTPwB.

The diploma thesis gives an overview of the role of maritime transportation in the international trade. It deals with the history, important documents used in the shipping operations, needed contracts and maritime organizations. Concerning the modern trends in maritime transportation, the containerization is pointed out as well as the actual image of shipping market which was affected by the global financial crisis. The thesis also mentions current trends in shipping industry, its challenges and warnings. A closer look is devoted to the Asian region and especially to China. To conclude, part of the paper focuses on the view to the future and an effort to estimate the development of the shipping industry in the next decade.

Transportation of oil and gas by the Sea characterizes challenges from a safety viewpoint. In this type of transportation, different sizes of special tankers carrying oil and gas. The marine transportation of these scarce natural riches is involved with risks and hazards, which may lead to many losses; for instance, wasting oil and gas, injuries of people, damaging ships and properties, and damaging environment. The main purpose of this thesis is to evaluate the risks, hazards, and accidents during transportation of oil and gas (mainly Crude Oil, liquefied petroleum gas, and Liquefied natural gas) by the Sea with concentrating on transport safety. Hence, a better understanding of these risks and hazards can contribute to decrease of addressed losses.This study is carried out on risks associated with maritime transportation of oil and gas starting with describing the general casual chain (dealing with causes, incidents, accidents and consequences/causalities), continuing with describing risk analysis techniques (including event tree analysis and fault tree analysis) and risk control measures/options, and finally implementing aforesaid investigations on real data from two areas; namely UK territorial waters and the Baltic Sea.In this study, the results of analyzing data from 1991 to 2010 in UK territorial waters revealed that collision and grounding were two most common accidents in terms of crude oil tankers, LPG and LNG carriers in which 44% of all accidents were equally divided between collision and grounding. In this case, investigation on data from 2004 to 2010 in the Baltic Sea regarding tankers with cargo types of crude oil, oil, oil product and gases also repeated the same findings in that collision and grounding shared the biggest proportion of accidents with 50% and 34% respectively. Analysis of data in UK territorial waters provided that human factor was the main reason behind accidents with 46% followed by technical factor with 39%. Human factor and technical factor recognized also as the main causes of accidents in the Baltic Sea with 33% and 25% respectively. Regarding this subject, human error recognized as the chief culprit and failures in part of design & construction was the second main initial causes of accidents in terms of both human and technical factors. The results of analyzing records from the Baltic Sea also provided that whilst human factor shared the biggest proportion of causes behind accidents, technical factor was the only cause of accidents contributing to all types of accidents. Findings are useful from safety outlook as if specifying accidents and causes of accidents during the Sea transportation of oil and gas. / Program: MSc in Industrial Engineering - Logistics Management

L’objectif de rechercher une harmonisation possible, dans le droit des transports maritimes, se justifie par un intérêt purement économique. L'idée est de permettre la création d'un commerce méditerranéen, qui s’affranchirait des obstacles techniques non tarifaires constitués par la fragmentation des systèmes juridiques. En effet, il ne s’agit pas là, de créer une législation commune entre les 43 pays de l’Union pour la Méditerranée, afin de rapprocher leur culture juridique, mais de mettre en place une harmonisation du droit des transports maritimes, permettant de mieux surmonter les obstacles, disparités, à la mise en place d’un marché commun. Mais quels peuvent être ces obstacles ? Il s’agit des normes tarifaires, des tarifs douaniers…Ces obstacles sont également juridiques. Ainsi, peut-on admettre ou prévoir une harmonisation des transports maritimes, ayant une incidence sur le commerce méditerranéen ? Constitue-t-il un îlot de résistance au même titre que le droit fiscal ou le droit social ? Il apparaît certes qu’on peut l’harmoniser. En effet, le transport maritime s’apparente comme l’outil permettant la libre circulation des marchandises dans un ensemble commun. C’est de cette manière que l’Union européenne s’est construite. D’ailleurs, ne s’agit-il pas d’un domaine déjà harmonisé entre ces pays ? Il faut savoir, qu’avant la mise en place d’une Union pour la Méditerranée, il existait de nombreuses conventions et organisations promouvant une harmonisation dans ce domaine. En somme la méditerranisation des transports maritimes requiert la méditerranisation des règles juridiques qui l’encadrent. / The purpose to seek a possible harmonisation of the maritime transportation/transport law is based on a purely economic interest. The idea is to enable the establishment a Mediterranean trade. Indeed, it doesn't mean to establish a common legislation/law between 43 countries of the Mediterranean Union, in order to bring their legal system closer. Though, the real purpose is that the implementation of the harmonisation of the maritime transportation law, will enable to anticipate/foresee the obstacles barriers, the disparities, the gaps to implement a common market. What might be those obstacles/barriers? They are the customs duties (or tariffs). So can we admit or predict the unification of the (sea) shipping, having an impact on the euro-Mediterranean trade? It really seems that we can harmonise it. In effect, the shipping is akin to a tool (to enhance) for the free movement of goods/ traffic of products in a common set of goals. In fact, the shipping is a tool to enhance for the free movement of goods. By the way, isn't it already a harmonised field/area between these countries? Be aware, it is undeniable that before the establishment of the Union for the Mediterranean, there were also many conventions (agreements) and organisations promoting a possible harmonisation in this area.

Orientador: Vinícius Amaral Armentano / Tese (doutorado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Faculdade de Engenharia Elétrica e de Computação / Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-22T22:56:34Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Branchini_RodrigoMoretti_D.pdf: 2921053 bytes, checksum: 29694a6f4803c5c222c97cbe95a2b199 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2013 / Resumo: Este trabalho aborda um problema de planejamento tático em empresas de transporte marítimo de carga que coletam e entregam as demandas contratadas por seus clientes. As viagens associadas a estas demandas são obrigatórias, mas a empresa pode também atender a demandas spot associadas com viagens opcionais para aumentar seu lucro durante um horizonte de tempo de médio prazo. O problema de otimização é formulado como um modelo de programação inteira mista que é definido em um grafo orientado em que nós representam viagens obrigatórias e opcionais. As decisões do modelo são determinar o número e tipo de navios que compõem a frota, designar um navio a um conjunto de viagens obrigatórias e opcionais, definir as rotas de cada navio e estipular os tempos de início de atendimento nos portos para cada viagem. Um algoritmo de busca tabu com uma lista de candidatos e um conjunto de soluções de elite são propostos para resolver instâncias do problema. Os resultados computacionais da busca tabu são comparados com as soluções ótimas e sub-ótimas encontradas pelo CPLEX para o modelo de programação inteira mista / Abstract: We address a tactical planning problem faced by many liner shipping companies that have committed contractual voyages while trying to serve optional spot voyages to increase its revenue over the medium-term horizon. The optimization problem is formulated as a mixed integer programming model that is defined on a directed graph whose nodes represent contractual and spot voyages. The decisions include the number and type of vessels deployed the assignment of vessels to contractual and spot voyages and the determination of vessel routes and schedules in order to maximize the profit. A tabu search algorithm with a candidate list and a pool of elite and diverse solutions is proposed in order to solve a set of benchmark instances of the problem. The results obtained by tabu search are compared to optimal and suboptimal solutions yielded by the CPLEX solver to the mixed integer programming formulation of the problem / Doutorado / Automação / Doutor em Engenharia Elétrica

This master thesis deals with the very current topic of ballast water management, a very specific field in the maritime shipping industry. The aim of the thesis is to introduce the subject clearly and to sum up the main issues which restrain a smooth implementation of new regulations that emerged from a recently adopted international treaty. This treaty, the so-called Ballast Water Management Convention, will possibly have immediate impact on the seafreight market rates and thus on the entire international trade. So purpose of this thesis is to estimate what the result might be like.