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Transportation is the backbone of globalization and international trade. Moving goods over long distances enables companies to access new markets and consumers to buy products from other parts of the world. Global trade is particularly driven by sea freight due to low cost and air cargo owing to its high speed, making both transport modes key for many industries. Anticipating future developments in transportation remains a black box for many companies. The logistics sector is characterized by high price uncertainty, market volatility, and product complexity. Transport is often organized manually and only based on employees’ experience, making it prone to error. Recent trends in international trade further complicate companies’ decisionmaking. Trends include changes in global demand, particularly driven by growing wealth in Asian countries, leading to shifts in freight rates on major trade lanes. The risk of supply chain disruptions, such as delays of container vessels, has also been increasing in the last few years. More frequent extreme weather events caused by climate change and higher traffic on shipping routes make on-time arrivals more challenging than ever. Recent breakthroughs in research indicate that novel data analytics-based methods can help to increase transparency in transportation by supporting the decision-making of shipping players. It has become evident that machine learning enhances forecast accuracy, which could enable companies to reduce uncertainty in their logistics. In our first study (Chapter 2), we1 analyze the container shipping industry to predict delays of vessels. With a forecast accuracy of 77%, we identify important influencing factors for shipping delays. This primarily includes the time between ports, piracy risk, demographics, weather, traffic in maritime chokepoints, and port congestion. In our second study (Chapter 3), we present what methods need to be applied to predict spot rates in container shipping. With an accuracy of 89%, our forecasts support the decision-making of various shipping players in negotiating their transportation contracts. My dissertation journey then took me to the air cargo industry in our third study (Chapter 4). By assessing the predictability of long-term air freight rates, we show that machine learning improves forecasts, especially for trade lanes with volatile and complex price trends. As a result, we achieve an accuracy of 93%, enabling air carriers and freight forwarders to increase their operating profits by 30%. By proposing prediction solutions featuring high accuracy, robustness, and applicability in practice, this dissertation demonstrates that predictive analytics enhance transparency in transportation. It is our hope that more advanced technologies, such as machine learning, will play an increasingly important role in future decision-making on transportation.
1The term “we” in this dissertation always refers to the authors of Viellechner and Spinler (2020, 2021a,b,c)
This dissertation investigates capacity and technology choice decisions in maritime container shipping under demand and regulatory uncertainty. In an introductory overview, we discuss the industry and the challenges that complicate investment decisions in shipping: e. g., the multitude of decisions, market volatility, excess capacities and the trend of new environmental regulation. Real option valuation methods can account for strategic options and the uncertainties in capacity decisions in shipping. To assess the impact of chartering on maritime investment, we analyze investment and charter options individually in a continuous-time model. We combine both in a discrete-time approach taking into account key features of the industry: investment with time to build, divestment, chartering, an endogenous charter rate, layup, and demand uncertainty. While we find demand volatility to increase optimal capacities if only investment with time to build is possible, chartering reduces this effect. It adds value to the overall project, should be mainly applied to compensate unexpected capacity shortages and needs to be considered in decision-making. Uncertainty about future eco-regulation is a further challenge for the industry. In an approximate dynamic programming model extension, we account for a stochastic introduction of operating cost-increasing regulation to assess optimal capacity choice under regulatory uncertainty. Regulation can allow for grandfathering, affecting only newly acquired vessels. We find uncertainty about future regulation with grandfathering to induce heavy up-front investment to secure a low cost base even in regulated markets. Such uncertainty may increase excess capacities and industry emissions. Uncertainty without grandfathering, however, reduces overall investment and emissions. In this case, the market may contract as investors resort to chartering until uncertainty is resolved. To also assess technology choice in light of uncertain future regulation, we develop a two-phase regime-switching model. We derive analytical solutions and study the effects of regulatory uncertainty on technology choice in a numerical extension that relaxes restrictive assumptions. We find that such uncertainty can increase optimal capacities and that a single-technology strategy is preferable over a fleet of mixed technologies in most cases. We further extend the model and compare the effectiveness of two different regimes—an emissions cap and an emissions tax. Results suggest that an emissions cap is more effective at reducing overall emissions while a tax causes lower regulation cost. The regime choice also determines the optimal technological fleet composition. The main implication is that chartering and regulatory uncertainty have a strong effect on optimal investment in shipping and should be considered in project valuation. Further, regulatory uncertainty can lead to unintended investment behavior that undermines regulatory goals. Lastly, regulatory regimes are not equally effective/efficient in reducing the environmental footprint of shipping and constitute varying incentives for investing in eco-friendly technology.