During recent years ARL Consulting have completed several projects incorporating complex mathematical models as an integral part of the solution provided. This is in response to the continously increasing unit counts in shipping and transport, like growing size of vessels, number of transports, number of hub-and-spoke connection opportunities, which makes it harder and harder to identify and evaluate multiple options by human force only.
In a series of shipZine articles three business challenges in the transport industry, which has been successfully resolved by applying scientific approaches, will be explored:
- selection of optimal container vessel berthing at quay side
- evaluation of relevant vessel deployment opportunities
- vessel bunker consumption calculation
Each of the business scenarios provide benefits for the transportation organisation:
1) selection of optimal container vessel berthing reduce the mileage required by the yard equipment for servicing the vessel; this results in direct fuel savings, time savings for equipment drivers, reduces wear-and-tear and allow for servicing of more vessels with the same amount of equipment and staff.
2) evaluation of relevant vessel deployment opportunities provides the deployment planners with the ability to consider feasible and relevant network and deployment scenarios, which can be assessed from an operational and commercial perspective, not only saving time with the planners, but highlighting deployment scenarios, with benefical cost and income opportunities, which otherwise would not have been considered due to the complexity of the many opportunities.
3) vessel bunker consumption calculation give the direct benefit of reduced bunkers costs.
brute force - Free On-Line Dictionary of Computing:
<programming> A primitive programming style in which the programmer relies on the computer's processing power instead of using his own intelligence to simplify the problem, often ignoring problems of scale and applying naive methods suited to small problems directly to large ones. The term can also be used in reference to programming style: brute-force programs are written in a heavy-handed, tedious way, full of repetition and devoid of any elegance or useful abstraction
The mathemathical approaches used are all 'intelligent' alternatives to clean brute-force approach and reflect in some form that the computer system act as a human thinking brain -just much faster and more comprehensive.
Many other areas for harvesting benefit by using math force, like container vessel stowage planning, exist in the transport industry.
