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That was an interesting article. In the past I have worked with bulk commodity shipping (i.e ore + coal) rather than commercial freight. In my case the company
by bigger_cheese 10y ago
That was an interesting article. In the past I have worked with bulk commodity shipping (i.e ore + coal) rather than commercial freight. In my case the company owned the berth the and the unloaders. So it was a similar but slightly different problem space. The biggest issue was obtaining a reliable schedule from the ships. When I worked there the harbor master communicated directly with ships captain about expected arrival date etc and it was all stored on spreadsheets.
There is probably room in this space for some ML smarts similar to what is in the article (extrapolating arrival times based on weather, ships condition, Panama Canal data etc.) and forecasting ahead for a more accurate arrival date.
The benefit for doing this is because of something called "Demurrage" which comes into play. Demmurage is a special type of charge that is incurred when there are unloading delays. It wasn't unheard of because of the absence of accurate scheduling for multiple ships to arrive within close proximity of each other. When this happened the ships would be forced to lined up outside of the harbor either waiting for tug boat availability to tow them into berth or waiting for actual space on the berth. They'd be sitting there racking up demurrage charges. There is a pay off in optimising berth scheduling, whether its large enough to build a company around I'm not sure...
- Fiahil 10y ago> There is a pay off in optimising berth scheduling, whether its large enough to build a company around I'm not sure... It's a small but quite lucrative market. We're talking about less than 10 players for 10M+ contracts. Do you know if demurrage charges are applied for vessels sitting offshore as storage?
- bigger_cheese 10y agoI'm not sure in that case. It may be contract specific. If the ship is waiting on harbour control to let it in to unload demurrage definitely applies. If it has not been formally handed over to harbour control it may not.
- notahacker 10y agoAs I understand it the demurrage charges apply when a third party doesn't receive the goods (or the use of the ship) by the expected time, so presumably isn't applied if the ship is intended to hold the goods offshore over a particular period. There's a big market in scheduling and monitoring systems for commercial aviation but the economics are very different (delays equal very expensive fuel burn and have safety and environmental implications, schedules are tight and turnaround and connection times measured in minutes, time slots at certain airports are multimillion dollar tradeable assets) as is the level of regulation.
- kyllo 10y agoIn container shipping, demurrage charges also apply to the individual containers. If a container misses a sailing and sits on the dock too long waiting for the next one, it starts to rack up charges on the order of $100 or $150 a day.