Maritime Transportation: Between AVs and tankers, there is (not) the middle of the sea

Abstract

The maritime transportation of crude oil by tankers represents a major aspect of global trade, as crude oil is refined to all sorts of different fuel products. The crude oil shipping market is a decentralized system based on traditional concepts with multiple stakeholders involved (e.g. ship owners, charterers, ship brokers, etc.). Most recently (March 2021), the blockage of the Suez Canal by a vessel showed that this system can be strongly affected by external factors. Literature on crude oil shipping either addresses approaches for very specific problems, therefore not applicable to other scenarios, or more general aspects, mainly by focusing on analytical methods. Alternatively, we present in this Master’s thesis a general simulation framework in order to analyze, model and simulate the crude oil shipping market in its entirety. For this work, we strongly collaborated with the commercial ship management group, The Signal Group, who provided us access to their valuable knowledge, software and data. The simulation framework describes efficiency in crude oil shipping as combination of incomparable metrics addressing resources in time, emission and cost. Based on that, a concept for preferences is defined where these metrics are considered simultaneously, accounting for mixed strategies during simulation. The mathematical model and implementation of the framework cover multiple different aspects, e.g. graphs representing the transportation network, demands and vessels, etc. By running simulations over time, dynamic aspects of the system could be analyzed, such as congestion at canals. This dynamic interaction and dependence of the vessels on each other enables a new perspective for the usually static scheduling and ship routing problems. The results of the simulations based on different preferences provide first insights on the relations between the chosen metrics for efficiency. The implemented simulation framework provides a solid foundation for further refinements and extensions in the future, especially due to its modularity. Ultimately, this should lead to a better understanding of efficiency in crude oil shipping and its optimization.