Advances in Shipping Data Analysis and Modeling

Tracking and Mapping Maritime Flows in the Age of Big Data

César Ducruet

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351985086
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Shipping flows – maritime 'footprints' – remain underexplored in the existing literature despite the crucial importance of freight transport for global trade and economic development. Additionally, decision-makers lack a comprehensive view on how shipping flows can be measured, analyzed, and mapped in order to support their policies and strategies. This interdisciplinary volume, drawing on an international cast-list of experts, explores a number of crucial issues in shipping data estimation, construction, collection, mining, analysis, visualization, and mapping.

Advances in Shipping Data Analysis and Modeling delivers several key messages. First, that in a world of just-in-time delivery and rapid freight transit, it is important to bear in mind the long-term roots of current trends as well as foreseeable future developments because shipping patterns exhibit recurrent, if not cyclical and path-dependent, dynamics. Second, shipping flows are currently often understood at the micro-level of intra-urban logistics delivery and at the national level using commodity flow analyses, but this volume emphasizes the need to expand the scale of analysis by offering new evidence on the changing distribution of global and international shipping flows, based on actual data. Third, that this multidisciplinary approach to shipping flows can shed important light on crucial issues that go beyond shipping itself including climate change, urban development, technological change, commodity specialization, digital humanities, navigation patterns, international trade, and regional growth.

Edited by experts in their field, this volume is of upmost importance to those who study industrial economics, shipping industries and economic and transport geography.

1
Introduction

Taking the pulse of world trade and movement

César Ducruet

Water, water, everywhere, nor any drop to drink.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1798) The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

How many maps of worldwide maritime flows have been printed during the last century based on actual shipping data? The response is extraordinarily ridiculous: less than a dozen. This is particularly surprising, given that in the past and still nowadays, about 90% of global trade volumes travel via maritime transport, so being aware of the precise nature, volume, and distribution of shipping flows in the past, present, and future should be crucial for both researchers and practitioners. Like many other research fields, the digital revolution of the late 1990s and early 2000s had the effect of exponentially increasing our knowledge on all sorts of shipping flows, from the real-time position of individual ships to the macroscopic pattern of global maritime routes (Ducruet, 2016; Hoffmann et al., 2017).

Yet, maritime research is characterized by a number of weaknesses that the current book wishes to address. First, it remains a much fragmented area due to its strong disciplinary focus and limited dialogue among the different perspectives. There is an urgent need to explore and reveal existing and potential bridges between dispersed works on shipping, the backbone of the world economy (Lau et al., 2017). Second, shipping itself still occupies a relatively peripheral place in mainstream research, as it is often seen (and also advertised) as a technical, specialized subdiscipline of either history, economics, geography, management, or engineering (Ng et al., 2014). Links with wider themes and issues are underexplored to such an extent that huge efforts are needed to enhance the recognition of shipping in the academic and professional sphere. Third, and related with the former, the richness, diversity, and explanatory power of shipping data are underestimated – if not unknown – to a large audience, as well as the concepts, tools, and methods dedicated to analyze such information.

This volume proposes to tackle these three lacunae head on. The methodological entry based on shipping data is the common ground of all contributions, while those also question the nature of shipping itself as an industry but also as a vector and imprint of economic, cultural, and political interactions. How are shipping flows distributed and evolving across space and time? What do they tell us about the maritime and port sector and about the rest of the economy and society? This chapter aims to provide a comprehensive review of shipping data analyses and introduce the book’s contents. The next section is a tentative categorization of existing works distinguishing amongst two sets of approaches, where shipping-specific issues are central or peripheral, depending on the research angle. Finally, we present the perspectives and structure of the book.

Shipping data as a source for shipping and non-shipping research

Shipping information serves industry-specific purposes for a better understanding of the port and maritime sector itself. This is the case of traffic engineering, operations research (Windeck, 2013; Teodorovic, 2015), transport economics and management (Stopford, 2009; Song and Panayides, 2015; Cullinane and Lee, 2015; Luo and Yip, 2017), but also transport geography, through its focus on shipping line strategies and port competition (Rodrigue et al., 2017). Shipping data are thus vital to improve our understanding of the maritime and ports sector and therefore can be regarded as a support to decision-making. From such a perspective and beyond the increasing capacity to measure and analyze vast amounts of information, shipping data help in quantifying performance and cost issues in the operation of ports and ocean carriers. The main question here is how shipping is physically organized and can make supply and value chains more efficient. Nevertheless, shipping information remains costly and mainly used within the shipping world for commercial or operational purposes. Despite the abundance of scholarly works on ports and maritime transport in social sciences, the immense majority are essentially qualitative or bypass the lack of data by applying different sorts of techniques based on aggregated figures, estimates, and simulation models without any data. Many maps that appear in handbooks about maritime geography, economics, and history are drawn by hand in a very unprecise manner.

Interestingly, early cartographies of actual shipping data were explicitly motivated by providing accurate pictures of the world economy, shipping being less considered as an industry than as a footprint of wider human interactions across the Earth, at a time when maritime transport overwhelmingly dominated human and cargo mobilities. The first-ever example was provided by the French geographer André Siegfried (1940) when mapping the exact position of British merchant vessels on the globe in the late 1930s. Soon after, the American geographer, Edward Ullman (1949), mapped US seaborne trade routes with the objective to “take the pulse of world trade and movement”. Later on, another French geographer, Jacques Bertin (1973), mapped wheat maritime flows in medieval Europe, while the Massachussets Transportation Systems Center (McKenzie, 1975) proposed a density map of global vessel movements. During the next three decades, however, such analyses literally disappeared from academic and professional literature. Only a few examples could be found in other dark corners of the transport literature until the 2000s, mainly focusing on specific shipping companies or geographic areas (see Ducruet, 2016 for a review).

In line with the aforementioned digital revolution, an increasing volume of shipping data and variety of analytical tools emerged overtime. For instance, the online calculation of inter-port shipping distances and the visualization of these routes replaced the tedious reading of large printed tables (e.g., the Lloyd’s Maritime Atlas since 1951), such as Sea-distances and Searates. Other systems even made it possible to measure the cost and impact of intermodal shipping (e.g., the Geospatial Intermodal Freight Transportation or GIFT model)¹ at present time or in antiquity.² In terms of shipping data visualization, one may mention an online route-planning algorithm to model maritime paths between harbors (Poncet-Montanges, 2013); a European Atlas of the Seas³; and the OpenSeaMap⁴ and Google Oceans⁵ projects and applications. The most common online products consist of so-called heatmaps of shipping data based on radar (Automated Identification System, AIS) or satellite information. A variety of those maps are freely accessible online: ship emissions in the Baltic Sea (Johansson and Jalkanen, 2016), cargo and tanker ship distribution (Nelson, 2011), and a cartography of the Anthropocene (Globaïa, 2016). Major providers of shipping data, such as MarineTraffic and ExactEarth, show the real-time position of individual ships or through density maps. FleetMon Satellite AIS and FleetMon Explorer propose dynamic visualizations seen from space,⁶ while other projects visualize real-time ship trajectories to estimate carbon emissions⁷ and shipping patterns in the Bering Sea.⁸ Beyond sole visualization, shipping data analyses addressed various issues such as climate change, marine bioinvasions, anthropogenic noise monitoring and management, the diffusion of infectious diseases and terrorist attacks, environmental and health impacts, global urban accessibility, world regionalization, urban and regional dynamics, and the location of maritime advanced producer services, to name but a few (Ducruet, 2016).

A number of existing contributions adopted network analysis with the double objective and outcome to underline the mechanisms at stake behind the distribution of shipping flows and increase the visibility of maritime research in network science (Ducruet, 2015). In recent years, maritime network analysis kept growing apace with additional studies on network topology (Kang and Woo, 2017), robustness (Wang et al., 2016; Viljoen and Joubert, 2016), multiplexity and dynamics (Ducruet, 2017), and relationship with trade networks (Calatayud et al., 2017; Medda et al., 2017). In the field of digital humanities, several research projects excavated diverse historical records, such as Navigocorpus (1700–1821) (Marzagalli, 2015), the Venice Atlas (1283–1453) (Fournier, 2015), the Climatological Database for the World’s Oceans (1750–1850),⁹ the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database (1500–1900),¹⁰ the Sound Toll Registers (1497–1857),¹¹ the Old Weather project (Rogers, 2012), and the World Seastems project (1880–2009).¹² Other immense historical corpuses remain unexploited to date, such as the Suez Canal Archives¹³ reviewing origin-destination ship flows since 1869, the archives of the East Indian Trading Corporation containing 25 million shipping records (1595–1795),¹⁴ and North Atlantic migration flows (1815–1914).¹⁵

Measuring and visualizing shipping flows in the age of big data is thus everything but outdated, despite the recurrent belief that nowadays, our world only functions through virtual and digital flows (see also Antonopoulos, 2016). Immaterial connectivity is, of course, a huge challenge that goes along with physical, material movement as seen with the growing impact of e-commerce on global logistics and shipping (Wang, 2014). Our book is thus another push recalling the necessity not to ignore the material dimension of mobility and development as well as the particularity of actors and places (Hall and Hesse, 2012; Rodrigue et al., 2013; Urry et al., 2015; Laloë, 2016; Schwanen, 2016). The World Seastems project No. 313847, funded by the European Research Council (ERC) over the period 2013–2019, organized its second international workshop in April 2016 at the Paris Institute for Complex Systems (ISC-PIF). This event gathered no less than 72 participants coming from 14 different countries to offer a multidisciplinary perspective about the current theories, concepts, and data used to study shipping-related issues in the past and present, with a strong methodological focus. This book offers a vast array of models and methods borrowed from econometrics, computer science, engineering, spatial analysis, cartography, geomatics, statistics, mathematics, physics, geography, history, archaeology, and regional science. It also gathers, perhaps for the first time, studies of all kinds of shipping data, such as archaeological records, ancient texts, papyrus, and records, ship logbooks, vessel movements, customs data, liner shipping schedules, and AIS or radar data.

Perspectives and structure of the book

The remainder of the book is organized into three parts, each of them corresponding to a particular approach or type of shipping data analysis, namely connectivity analyses, geospatial analyses, and vulnerability analyses. The opening three chapters of Part 2 on connectivity all deal with winds but in very different ways. Ray Rivers et al. (Chapter 2) examine the likely effect of winds on shipping in ancient Greece to refine their spatial, inter-island network model nicely balanced between archaeological expertise and spatial analysis. Pascal Arna...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• 1 Introduction: taking the pulse of world trade and movement
• PART I Connectivity analyses
• PART II Geospatial analyses
• PART III Vulnerability analyses
• Afterword
• Epilogue
• Index