Search

Background: This paper addresses the common question of how service providers compare to their competitors and what their competitive advantages are. It focuses on the North Adriatic ports of Trieste, Koper, Rijeka, Venice, and Ravenna, all members of the North Adriatic Ports Association, analyzing their position, size, competitiveness, and role in the container market. Methods: The research employs three distinct methods: market structure analysis using several concentration indices, the R method for ranking terminals, and aggregation of these indices to create a combined index for port performance. Results: Based on the rankings, indicators, the BCG matrix, and future development plans for each terminal, the ports are ranked as follows: Koper, Rijeka, Trieste, Venice, and Ravenna. Koper emerges as the leader, positioned in the high market share and strong growth category. This advantageous position allows Koper to efficiently attract traffic without requiring substantial investments. Conclusions: The contribution of the work is that the specific measure indices were applied, which were not used in the analysis of the North Adriatic container terminals until now. The research provides both a broad and detailed understanding of the position, role, and condition of each terminal. This insight enables stakeholders to take timely, strategic actions aimed at boosting productivity and traffic, ultimately improving their competitive standing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to the European Maritime Safety Agency (EMSA), 70% of accidents on board were caused by human error, and almost one-fifth of these accidents have been related to inadequate supervision. Therefore, the aim of this study is to investigate which of the safety factors can influence the quality of safety supervision. For this purpose, a questionnaire with 24 statements was distributed to professional seafarers. Two exploratory factor analyses were conducted to identify the underlying factor structure. The first analysis yielded one factor, quality of safety supervision, and the second analysis yielded four factors, namely: safety communication, safety training, safety compliance, and safety rules and procedures. Hierarchical multiple regression analysis was applied to examine the influence of seafarers' demographic characteristics and the four identified factors on the quality of safety supervision. The results revealed the following two statistically significant predictors of safety supervision quality: safety communication and safety training. The theoretical and practical implications of the results in terms of improving the quality of safety supervision in the maritime industry were discussed and compared with results in other industries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inadequate human actions are still the main cause of all reported accidents and incidents on board ships. The aim of this study is to explore the influence of safety resource activities and other exploratory variables on seafarers' safety behaviour. For this study, a series of open-ended interviews were conducted to gain insight into how shipping organisations struggle with this issue. Following the interviews, a questionnaire was prepared and distributed to professional seafarers. Two exploratory factor analyses were conducted to identify the underlying factor structure and five factors emerged. Furthermore, three hierarchical multiple regression analyses were conducted to examine the influence of the factors obtained, namely, Company safety orientation and Additional safety incentives on seafarers' perceived Safety awareness, Job satisfaction, Risk acceptance and other exploratory variables. The study shows that the perceived resource-related activities of the organisation and the demographic characteristics of the respondents can influence the safety behaviour of seafarers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inspections on board tankers contribute to the prevention of accidents, which can have a significant impact to humans and environment. Therefore a high amount of tanker inspections is performed by various stakeholders. This practice could be made more efficient by introducing unified inspection regime, which covers existing areas of inspection, eliminates overlapping and has the potential to improve safety. In this paper an important aspect in defining inspection regime, inspection interval, is determined considering contradictory goals: lowering the costs of inspection and increasing useful service life of tanker structure and equipment, without compromising safety. A probabilistic approach has been applied to establish inspection schedule, which fulfils a range of requirements. Due to the many varieties of tanker types, their conditions, range of size and age span, the paper focuses on the 10 years AFRAMAX tanker. Results indicate that optimal inspection interval in the unified inspection regime for that tanker should be 3 months. Using modified input parameters, similar approach could be used for other tanker types. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a new optimization model for ship's cargo handling operations which solution gives the structure of cargo handling resources required, along with attaining the minimum total ‘in-port’ costs and the minimum of time required for completion of cargo operations. Due to complexity of the model which consists of composite multi-objective functions together with several decision variables and constraints, the solution has been sought by utilization of an adapted genetic algorithm combined with a hybrid algorithm. Testing of the model on real world data yielded acceptable results in a short time. In the course of decision making, the ship's operator can, on the basis of the proposed model and taking into consideration shipping market data, choose appropriate variation of the returned solution, which incorporates minimum costs, minimum of operational time and related cargo handling resources. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Copyright of Transport (16484142) is the property of Vilnius Gediminas Technical University and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper considers a problem of planning short term operations in a bulk terminal faced by port management when making tactical decisions. Ship loading and discharging, cargo stocking, the maintenance and service of facility equipment are regular operations of a bulk terminal which is a subsystem of a sea port the conduct of which is subject to difficult-to-predict or unforeseen influences. The problem that port management encounters in day to day operations looks into making the best possible plan with the scheduled duration of operations/states and transition instants, considering various internal and external factors influencing terminal performance. A state and transition model is used for deriving effective solutions to obtaining the state order and state transition time of a bulk terminal with an objective of minimizing operational costs. The behaviour of the terminal is tested applying the stochastic and deterministic method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]