Communications in Transportation Research 1 (2021) 100011

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Communications in Transportation Research

journal homepage: www.journals.elsevier.com/communications-in-transportation-research

Emerging approaches applied to maritime transport research: Past

and future
Ran Yan a, Shuaian Wang a, Lu Zhen b, *, Gilbert Laporte c, d
a
Department of Logistics and Maritime Studies, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, 999077, Hong Kong, China
b
School of Management, Shanghai University, Shanghai, 200444, China
c
Department of Decision Sciences, HEC Montr
eal, Montr
eal, Qu
ebec, H3T 2B1, Canada
d
School of Management, University of Bath, Bath, BA2 7AY, UK

A R T I C L E I N F O A B S T R A C T

Keywords: Maritime transport is the backbone of international trade and globalization. Maritime transport research can be
Maritime transport roughly divided into two categories, namely the shipping side and the port side. Most of the classic approaches
Shipping adopted to address practical problems in these research topics are based on long-term observations and expert
Port
knowledge, while few of them are based on historical data accumulated from practice. In recent years, emerging
Data-driven modeling
Digitalization in the maritime industry
approaches, which we refer to as machine learning and deep learning techniques in this essay, have been
receiving a wider attention to solve practical problems. As a relatively conservative industry, there are some
initial trials of applying the emerging approaches to solve practical problems in the maritime sector. The objective
of this essay is to review the application of emerging approaches to maritime transport research. The main
research topics in maritime transport and classic methods developed to solve them are first presented. The
introduction of emerging approaches and their suitability to be applied in maritime transport research is then
discussed. Related existing studies are then reviewed according to problem settings, main data sources, and
emerging approaches adopted. Challenges and solutions in the process are also discussed from the perspectives of
data, model, users, and targets. Finally, promising future research directions are identified. This essay is the first
to give a comprehensive review of existing studies on developing machine learning and deep learning models
together with popular data sources used to address practical problems in maritime transport.

1. Overview of maritime transport research
Maritime transport carries more than 80% of world merchandise
trade by volume (UNCTAD, 2020). It is therefore regarded as the back-
bone of globalized trade and of the manufacturing supply chain. The
maritime transport sector is also a crucial component of a country’s
economic system, as it acts a fundamental role in importing and
exporting resources and providing employment opportunities. Given the
importance of maritime transport at the international and regional levels,
the related academic research has been receiving wide attention.
According to Talley (2013) and Shi and Li (2017), research topics in
maritime transport can be divided into the “shipping part” and the “port
part”. After reviewing 1,292 papers, Shi and Li (2017) further concluded
that the top five research topics in shipping part are shipping market
analysis, vessel operational management, green shipping, shipping safety
and security, and shipping company management. Meanwhile, the most
popular research topics in the port part include port management, per-
formance evaluation and competitiveness as well as terminal manage-
ment. For the research methods used in maritime transport research from
2000 to 2014, a total of seven methods are identified by the authors,
namely SIQO (survey, interview, questionnaire, and observation), eco-
nomic modeling, MES (mathematical, econometric, and statistical anal-
ysis), case study, CCCQ (conceptual, content, comparative, and
qualitative analysis), literature review, and simulation, which we call
classic approaches in this essay. The main aspects of these classic ap-
proaches are summarized in Table 1.
2. Emerging technologies and their application in maritime
transport research

* Corresponding author. Most of the classic approaches summarized in Section 1 are heavily
E-mail addresses: angel-ran.yan@connect.polyu.hk (R. Yan), wangshuaian@ dependent on long-term practical experience and expert knowledge in a
gmail.com (S. Wang), lzhen@shu.edu.cn (L. Zhen), gilbert.laporte@cirrelt.net qualitative manner. Even if some quantitative methods are applied, such
(G. Laporte). as economic modeling and MES, the developed models are also more or

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.commtr.2021.100011
Received 18 August 2021; Received in revised form 29 October 2021; Accepted 30 October 2021
Available online 10 November 2021
2772-4247/© 2021 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd on behalf of Tsinghua University Press. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).
R. Yan et al.
Table 1
Summary of classic approaches in maritime transport research.
Method Basic idea and content
SIQO Survey: The collection of information from a sample of
individuals through their responses to questions, including data
collecting, aggregating, and analyzing.
Interview: A conversation for gathering information which
usually includes an interviewer, who coordinates the whole
process and asks questions, and an interviewee, who responds to
the questions.
Questionnaire: A research instrument that consists of a set of
questions or other types of prompts with the aim to collect
information from a respondent*.
Observation: The study of non-experimental situations in which
behavior is observed and recorded, generating either qualitative
or quantitative results.
Economic Using different theories as well as quantitative or qualitative
modeling models and techniques to analytically evaluate the cause and
effects of any economic phenomenon.
MES Mathematical analysis: Modelling a nonmathematical situation,
phenomenon, and the relationship between the situations
mathematically, e.g., by developing mathematical models and
proposing proper solution approaches.
Econometric analysis: Constructing a set of equations to provide a
quantitative explanation of the behavior of economic variables.
Statistical analysis: Collecting and analyzing data based on
statistical assumptions and tests to draw meaningful inferences
from the samples to the whole population.
Case study An in-depth study of the research object from various and
comprehensive aspects to seek patterns and causes of its
behaviors.
CCCQ Conceptual analysis: Breaking down and analyzing concepts into
their constituent parts to gain better understandings of a
particular issue.
Content analysis: Quantifying and analyzing the presence of
certain words, themes, or concepts within some given qualitative
data.
Comparative analysis: Comparing of two or more processes,
documents, data sets, and other objectives.
Qualitative analysis: Using subjective judgement to analyze the
research object based on non-quantifiable information.
Literature An overview and evaluation of the available literature in a given
review subject or area.
Simulation An imitation of the operation of a real-world process or system
over time.
Note*: Questionnaire and survey are related but different terms. Survey contains
a relatively wider range of actions from question design, data collection and
analysis, and drawing a conclusion. This means that a survey always involves
questionnaires, while a single questionnaire is only one small part of survey.
less based on subjective judgement when making assumptions and con-
structing models. In addition, classic models rarely rely on data obtained
from practice as they are not data-driven (with econometric analysis and
statistical analysis as exceptions), and thus prevent them from learning
from data dynamically so as to mine useful information.
Recent years have witnessed a rapid growing of studies on developing
machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) models, which we call
emerging approaches in this essay, to solve practical problems. Both
emerging approaches are data-driven and belong to the area of artificial
intelligence (AI), which comprises techniques that enable a computer to
think like humans and mimic their behaviors to solve complex tasks
without or with little human intervention. According to Mitchell (1998),
an ML problem is defined as follows: “A computer program is said to
learn from experience E with respect to some task T and some perfor-
mance measure P, if its performance on T, as measured by P, improves
with experience E.” There are three types of ML models: supervised
learning (SL), unsupervised learning (UL), and reinforcement learning
(RL), whose definitions can easily be found in most ML textbooks. Here
we only give their main points discussed in Bishop (2006) as follows.

SL: A training set comprising examples of the input vectors together
with their corresponding target vectors is used to train ML models. In
2
Communications in Transportation Research 1 (2021) 100011
the classification task, the objective is to assign each input vector to
one of a finite number of discrete categories. In the regression task,
the output consists of one or more continuous variables. Common SL
models include logistics regression (LR), support vector machine
(SVM), support vector regression (SVR), artificial neural networks
(ANN), Bayesian network (BN), decision tree (DT), random forest
(RF), and boosting machines (e.g., gradient boosting regression tree
[GBRT]).

UL: A training set consisting of a set of input vectors without any
corresponding target values used to train ML models. Common UL
tasks include clustering, density estimation, and association rule
mining. Common UL algorithms include k-means, principal compo-
nent analysis, A priori, and autoencoders.

RL: A problem of finding suitable actions to take in a given situation to
maximize a reward by taking a sequence of states and actions. Com-
mon approaches are model-free RLs relying on trial-and-error expe-
rience to set up the optimal policy, and model-based RLs attempting
to model the environment and choose the optimal policy.
DL, although usually treated separately from ML, is actually a subfield
of ML which is based on deep neural networks (DNNs) that consist of
multiple hidden layers with advanced neurons (Larochelle et al., 2009).
The most common DL models are convolutional neural networks (CNNs)
widely applied in computer vision and speech recognition and recurrent
neural networks (RNNs) designed for sequential data structures such as
time-series data and natural language processing.
Both emerging approaches covered in this essay are data driven;
therefore, model development is highly dependent on data while model
performance is closely related to data quality and quantity. The general
procedure of model construction is as follows. To begin with, the
practical problem to be addressed should be clarified, especially the
application scenarios, users, and prediction accuracy required. Then,
necessary data fields need to be identified, and the related data sources
as well as their availability, costs, quality, and quantity should be
investigated. Next, required data are collected, and those from different
sources should be fused. After formulating the whole dataset, feature
engineering should be conducted, including data preprocessing, feature
deletion and creation, dimension reduction, feature encoding, and data
normalization and standardization. Then, proper ML or DL models
should be developed in a trial-and-error manner considering features
and target(s), the allowed computation time and power, and the
requested model accuracy and interpretability. Hyperparameters in the
ML or DL models should also be tuned for better generalization ability
and prediction performance. It should also be mentioned that features
might need further processing in this step in certain models. Finally, the
constructed ML or DL models should be evaluated by various metrics. In
regression tasks, common metrics are the mean squared error, the root
mean squared error, and the mean absolute error. In classification tasks,
common metrics are the confusion matrix, accuracy, recall, precision,
and the F1 score. In a practical implementation, the model may need to
be iteratively adjusted and improved to cope with changing
requirements.
The key merits of applying emerging approaches to address practical
problems are summarized as follows. First, emerging approaches with
data-driven property allow the use of past information (which mainly
refers to data) to predict the future, and thus can avoid false assumptions
and being swayed by biases resulted by subjective expert judgement.
Second, decision making based on emerging approaches is generally
more accurate and effective than that based on expert knowledge, which
is the result of the data-driven property of emerging approaches.
Therefore, the accountability of such decisions can be significantly
improved, and thus future risks can also be reduced. Third, prediction
results given by emerging approaches and the follow-up decisions made
are more consistent with the status quo as they are derived from his-
torical data from practice. Moreover, they can be constantly improved in
the future with the accumulation and incorporation of new data.
R. Yan et al.
Although emerging approaches have already been widely applied in
some disciplines, their adoption in the maritime industry remains limited
so far. We argue that it is now feasible and necessary to develop these
approaches for the maritime industry. On the one hand, given a growing
volume of shipping data with higher accuracy from automatic identifi-
cation systems (AIS), global positioning systems, and tracking devices for
cargo, containers, and machinery devices, the accessibility of finer
granularity and more accurate sea and weather data, and larger capacity
devices for real-time data transmission and storage, the quantity and
quality of data in maritime transport are improved, facilitating the
following data-driven analysis. In addition, data reported by the gov-
ernments and maritime institutions are gradually being made available to
the public, while more comprehensive data fields are covered by com-
mercial databases (Clarkson, 2021). Therefore, it is justifiable to say that
the foundation of emerging approaches, i.e., the acquisition of data
required, can be basically fulfilled in maritime transport research. In
addition, various libraries for the implementation of ML and DL algo-
rithms also facilitate the development of emerging approaches even by
non-professional technicians in the maritime industry. Such program-
ming libraries include but are not limited to TensorFlow, PyTorch,
Theano, Keras, and SciKit Learn in Python, and CARAT, Nnet, and
deepnet in R, where the newly proposed algorithms are continuously
included, making the construction of tailored ML and DL models easier.
Furthermore, the rapid growth of computation power and algorithm
acceleration techniques further enhance the practicability of emerging
approaches, enabling them to process real-time tasks in maritime
transportation.
On the other hand, there are urgent needs of the contemporary
maritime industry for digital transformation and technological innova-
tion, while initial trials have been made with the assistance of AI tech-
nology. A research hotspot for applying emerging technology in the
shipping side is the development of maritime autonomous surface ship
(MASS), which is regarded as the future of the maritime industry (Bakdi
et al., 2021; Szelangiewicz et al., 2021). At present, autonomous and
remote-controlled ships based on sensor fusion, intelligent control algo-
rithms, as well as effective communication and connectivity, that allow
the ship itself to collect and process data from surrounding environment
and make appropriate and timely responses, are being tested in some sea
areas. More commonly, massive data collected from onboard sensors
together with the sea and weather conditions and port conditions are
used to derive the estimated time of arrival (ETA) and the estimated time
of departure (ETD), adjust container routing, and reduce fuel consump-
tion. Regarding the port side, the concept of smart port has emerged,
which encompasses state-of-the-art technologies including big data, AI,
Internet of Things, blockchain technology, and 5G connection. Pioneer
smart ports such as Hamburg, Rotterdam, Quebec, and Singapore are
using these technologies to enhance their operations and solutions to
optimize maritime and land transport operations while being more
environmentally friendly. These limited existing attempts have already
shown that shipping and port services can significantly benefit from
digital transformation with emerging approaches as the core (UNCTAD,
2019).
3. Objective and structure
The aim of this essay is to review typical applications of emerging
approaches to solve maritime transport problems from the shipping side
and the port side. In the first step, we searched related academic papers
from Scopus, Google Scholar, and Science Citation Index databases. In
the second step, papers citing the papers found in the first step as well as
papers cited by them are investigated. In the third step, relevant research
topics are identified, and representatives under each topic are illustrated.
We then summarize the common data sources, and the related papers are
further reviewed from the perspectives of problems addressed and
methods adopted. The research topics, problem settings, main data
sources, and the main types of emerging approaches developed in related
3
Communications in Transportation Research 1 (2021) 100011
papers are summarized in Table 2. Finally, challenges, solutions, and
future research directions of applying emerging approaches to address
practical maritime transport problems are presented. The remainder of
this study is organized as follows. Section 4 introduces common data
sources adopted by the related existing literature. Section 5 provides
typical applications of emerging approaches in maritime transport. Sec-
tion 6 discusses challenges and solutions of applying emerging ap-
proaches to maritime transport research. Section 7 presents promising
future research directions. Section 8 concludes this essay.
4. Introduction of common data sources
This section aims to briefly introduce popular data sources used in
maritime transport research based on emerging approaches presented in
Table 2.

AIS
Table 2 indicates that AIS is no doubt the most popular and important
data source facilitating data-driven maritime transport research using
emerging approaches. All international voyage ships with a gross
tonnage above 300 and all passenger ships are obliged to be equipped
with an AIS transmitter. AIS provides updates on dynamic vessel sailing
information in different time intervals depending on sailing speeds, while
static and voyage information is usually updated every 6 min or when
any field is changed. Especially, dynamic information mainly includes a
vessel’s real-time position with accuracy indication, record reporting
time, course and overground speed, heading degree, navigation status,
and rate of turn. Static information mainly includes vessel identifiers
(IMO number, maritime mobile service identity [MMSI], call sign, and
ship name), vessel type and dimensions (length and beam), and location
of position fixing antenna. Voyage related information includes vessel’s
draught, type of cargo, and voyage destination and the ETA (Meijer,
2017; Yang et al., 2019). For detailed introduction of AIS and its appli-
cation, readers are referred to Yang et al. (2019) and Tu et al. (2017). At
present, AIS data can be collected from commercial websites such as
AISHub, Elane, ExactEarth, FleetMon, IHS Markit, and Marine Traffic, to
name just a few (Tu et al., 2017).

Ship specifications
Specifications of individual ships in the world merchant fleet can be
found in commercial databases such as Lloyd’s List Intelligence1 and
Shipping Intelligence Network2, where accurate, up-to-date, and
comprehensive features of individual vessels such as current and former
names, ship identification numbers, ship type, tonnages and dimensions,
builder and built date, ship operational information such as owner,
manager, registration, flag, and classification, and main and auxiliary
machinery details are provided. Features of vessels with certain charac-
teristics, for example, in certain classification societies (e.g., American
Bureau of Shipping3) and the sunken ships (e.g., International Registry of
Sunken Ships4), are provided by specific databases.

Ship sailing records
Ship sailing records are mainly from onboard sensors and ship noon
report. Especially, sensor data are automatically collected from multiple
sensors installed onboard a ship in a fixed time interval ranging from
seconds to minutes (and thus they are usually associated with a large
scale) (Wang et al., 2016). The main sensors include GPS receiver to track
1
https://ihsmarkit.com/products/maritime-ships-register.html.
2
https://www.clarksons.net/portal/.
3
https://ww2.eagle.org/en.html.
4
http://www.shipwreckregistry.com/.
R. Yan et al. Communications in Transportation Research 1 (2021) 100011

Table 2
Summary of the papers covered in this essay.
Problem Research topic Problem settings Main data sources ML models adopted DL models adopted
category

Shipping Ship trajectory Prediction of vessel trajectory in the near AIS SVM, ELM, k-NNs, autoencoder LSTM, GRU, GAN
prediction future based on historical time series
trajectory points
Shipping Ship risk prediction Prediction of the occurrence of vessel AIS; SVM, MLP, tree-based models, k-NN LSTM and its variants, CNNs,
and safety collision accidents; Maritime accident regression, BN, k-means, KDE, ANN, deep RL
management Analysis of ship accident data and reports statistics and accident polynomial regression, GBRT
reports
Shipping Ship inspection Prediction of ship risk; PSC inspection BN, SVM, tree-based models, None
planning Optimization of onboard inspection records; association rule mining
sequence; Ship specifications
Analysis of the influencing factors of port
state control (PSC) inspection results and
the influences of PSC inspection
Shipping Ship energy Prediction of ship fuel consumption in Ship sailing records ANN, LR, tree-based models, LASSO, Hybrid model combining
efficiency prediction various environments (e.g., noon report); ridge regression, SVR, SOM, GMM, LSTM, RNN, and ENN, ANN
Marine weather fuzzy c-means clustering with 10 hidden layers
forecasts
Shipping Ocean freight market Prediction of Baltic Dry Index (BDI); Market condition ANN, SVR, RF, GBR, MLP RNN, LSTM
condition prediction Prediction of sea freight rate indicators such as BDI
Port Ship destination and Prediction of ship destination (turning AIS; DBSCAN, ANN, RF, GBRT, SVM DNN
arrival time point identification and trajectory Marine weather
prediction extraction); forecasts;
Prediction of ship arrival time to a port; Port statistics
Prediction of equivalent problems of ship
arrival time to a port
Port Port condition Prediction of port cargo volume; Port statistics; ANN, SVM, RF, SVR LSTM
prediction Prediction of port traffic volume Bill of lading

real-time position and ship navigation speed, shaft power tester to record
torque of the shaft, fuel consumption sensor to detect instantaneous fuel
consumption rate, wind speed and direction sensors to detect wind
conditions, and water depth sensor to acquire water depth. In contrast,
the ship noon report is the ship’s sailing profile filled manually by crew
members on a daily basis (usually noon at the local time) (Du et al.,
2019). Common fields of ship noon report include ship geographical
location, distances covered since the voyage and the last report, average
propeller revolutions per minute (RPM), engine speed, sailing speed,
total cargo hold, as well as sea and weather conditions regarding wind,
current, and wave (Yan et al., 2020a). One drawback of ship noon report
data is that only one report is generated for one day, while many data
fields are manually filled or are the average over a period. Therefore, data
quantity and quality of ship noon report are generally lower than those
from onboard sensors.

PSC inspection records
PSC inspection records are published by regional PSC organizations,
which are also called PSC Memorandum of Understandings (MoUs), in
their individual databases. Currently, there are nine MoUs around the
world in additional to the United States Coast Guard. Among them,
Tokyo MoU7 in the Asia Pacific region and Paris MoU8 covering North
America and Europe take leading roles. Records of ship inspections,
which cover ship information (e.g., ship identity, type, certificates,
dimension, operation information, and historical inspection records
within the MoU) and inspection information (e.g., detailed deficiency
and detention conditions in an inspection) carried out by all member
states of an MoU are published in a public database. It is also noted that
the ship selection procedures, onboard inspection criteria and scheme,
and data fields provided are different in different MoUs.

Ship accident data
Marine weather forecasts

Public global ship accident data are published by the International
Maritime Organization (IMO) in Marine Casualties and Incidents5 in its
Global Integrated Shipping Information System (GISIS). It contains two
types of information regarding ship casualties: factual data collected from
various sources, and more elaborate information based on the reports of
investigations into casualties received at IMO (IMO, 2021a). Marine ac-
cident statistics and the detailed investigation reports are also published
by some local marine departments or administrations. For example, in-
formation on marine accidents within the Hong Kong waters and related
to Hong Kong registered ships is published by the Marine Accident
Investigation Section (MAIS) under the Marine Department of Hong Kong
Special Administrative Region6, where an overview and detailed acci-
dent statistics are available.
Marine weather refers to the atmospheric and ocean-wave conditions
at sea with the focus on wind speed and direction, wave heights and
periods, roughness of nearshore waters, and significant weather (such as
storms and hurricanes), which can facilitate vessel navigation and ensure
smooth sailing on the high seas. Popular online resources of marine
weather forecasts used in existing research are National Marine Envi-
ronmental Forecasting Center (NMEFC), National Oceanic and Atmo-
spheric Administration (NOAA), Weathernews Inc. (WNI), Copernicus
Marine Environment Monitoring Service (CMEMS), and the European
Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), while different
data fields and formats are provided by different online weather forecast
resources. For example, ECMWF (referred to as ERA5) provides
comprehensive weather data in regular latitude-longitude grid with
horizontal resolution as 0.25 0.25 for atmosphere and 0.5 0.5 for
ocean waves with 1 h as the temporal resolution. The weather forecasts
are updated once a day (ERA5, 2021).

5
https://gisis.imo.org/Public/MCI/Default.aspx.
6 7
https://www.mardep.gov.hk/en/publication/publications/reports/eovervie http://www.tokyo-mou.org/.
8
w.html. https://www.parismou.org/.

4
R. Yan et al.

Port statistics
Port statistics refers to key port indicators such as vessel statistics,
port container throughput, port cargo throughput, marine accidents, and
bunker sales. The data are published by individual ports on the corre-
sponding websites while the fields provided might be different from each
other. For example, Hong Kong Port9 provides vessel arrivals by ocean/
river, type, flag, and main berthing location; port container throughput of
Hong Kong port and Kwai Tsing container terminals as well as by
handling location and seaborne/river; port cargo throughput by
seaborne/river, amongst others. Similarly, bunker sales, vessels and
tanker arrivals, total cargo and container throughputs, and vessel arrivals
are published on the website of the Maritime and Port Authority of
Singapore10.

BDI
The BDI is regarded as a leading indicator of economic activity and
the barometer of the dry bulk shipping market. It is an index of high
volatility and is the average price paid for the transport of dry bulk
materials regarding Capesize (40%), Panamax (30%), and Supramax
(30%) across more than 20 routes. BDI is released on each working day
by the London-based Baltic Exchange and the data are fully accessible.
5. Typical applications of emerging approaches to maritime
transport
This section aims to review typical applications of ML and DL models
to address practical problems (which are mainly related to prediction
tasks) in maritime transport from the shipping side and the port side. One
should note that only representatives, not exhaustive studies under each
topic are covered.
5.1. Emerging approaches applied to address problems in the shipping side
5.1.1. Ship trajectory prediction
Accurate and efficient ship trajectory prediction is the foundation of
sailing risk analysis, while such prediction based on emerging ap-
proaches is mainly powered by AIS data. Existing literature developing
ML models for ship trajectory prediction includes Liu et al. (2020) who
adopt least squares SVM, Mao et al. (2018) who propose extreme
learning machine (ELM), Virjonen et al. (2018) who employ k-nearest
neighbors (k-NNs), and Murry and Perera (2020) who develop a dual
linear autoencoder approach. As dynamic AIS data providing ship navi-
gation status is of huge volume, DL models are also widely applied for
ship trajectory prediction in addition to ML models. Among them, RNN is
a popular DL model to predict vessel trajectory as it can make use of
sequential information whose output is dependent on previous compu-
tations, which is in line with the properties of ship trajectories. For
example, long-short term memory (LSTM) networks are developed in
Huang et al. (2020) and Li et al. (2019), and a gate recurrent unit (GRU)
is applied in Suo et al. (2020). A generative adversarial network (GAN)
with attention module and interaction module is also developed for ship
trajectory prediction (Wang and He, 2021).
One may also notice that the predicted ship trajectory has been
further extended to ship collision risk analysis in some studies. We
categorize these studies into ship risk prediction instead of pure ship
trajectory prediction as summarized in Section 5.1.2.
5.1.2. Ship risk prediction and safety management
Navigation safety has always been one of the top concerns of the
9
https://www.mardep.gov.hk/en/fact/portstat.html#1.
10
https://www.mpa.gov.sg/web/portal/home/maritime-singapore/port-stat
istics.
5
Communications in Transportation Research 1 (2021) 100011
global maritime sector. Among the frequently occurred maritime acci-
dents such as fire/explosion, foundering/sinking, and stranding/
grounding, collisions receive the widest attention from both the shipping
industry and the academic scholars due to their high frequency and the
severe consequence they cause (Huang et al., 2020). Among studies on
ship collision analysis and prediction based on ML models, SVMs are
adopted to predict ship future navigation status regarding course and
speed (Gang et al., 2021) and to divide the ship encounter azimuth map
so as to avoid collisions (Gao et al., 2020). Multilayer perceptron (MLP)
as a type of neural network, together with the fuzzy logic, is combined
with classic expert system for collision avoidance (Ahn et al., 2012). The
collision risk index is predicted using several popular ML models
including various types of tree-based models (e.g., RF, GBRT, and extra
trees regression), as well as SVM and k-NN regression, and the prediction
results are combined with D–S theory which is a traditional method to
evaluate ship collision risk (Abebe et al., 2021). DL models are also
applied to predict ship collision risk levels and achieve collision avoid-
ance, which can be found in Sawada et al. (2021) and Ma et al. (2020)
where LSTM and its variants are used. Ship navigation images extracted
from AIS data are investigated by CNNs to predict collision risk based on
image classification (Zhang et al., 2020c).
In addition to ship collision analysis and prediction, other types of
ship risk, e.g., ship grounding accident (Wu et al., 2017), fire accidents in
electric vehicle for vehicle carriers (Wu et al., 2021), seafarers’ nonfatal
injuries (Zhang et al., 2020b), and unattended machinery plants (Abaei
et al., 2021), are also predicted and investigated in the existing literature
using various types of BNs. Besides, ANN together with a belief
rule-based inference model and an evident reasoning rule is used to
predict engine wear fault (Xu et al., 2020). DNN, polynomial regression,
and GBRT are used to predict damage and oil outflow of tankers (Das
et al., 2021), and deep RL is used to predict shaft deformation of
medium-sized oil/chemical tanker (Choi et al., 2021).
Another popular research topic in maritime safety management is the
analysis of regional and global ship accident statistics and accident re-
ports, where BNs are the most popular methodology as they are partially
interpretable, while the dependencies between features and the classifi-
cation variable (i.e., the prediction target) can be visualized (Wang and
Yang, 2018; Fan et al., 2020a, 2020b; Khan et al., 2020; Li et al., 2021;
Ung, 2021; Liu et al., 2021). In addition, k-means is applied to analyze
the influence of human errors on ship accidents (Lema et al., 2014), while
the combination of k-means with kernel density estimation (KDE) is
applied to extract spatial patterns of global maritime accidents (Zhang
et al., 2021).
5.1.3. Ship selection and inspection process optimization in port state control
It is claimed by the IMO that the best way of improving safety at sea is
by developing international regulations that are followed by all shipping
nations (IMO, 2021a). Vessel inspection carried out by port states, which
is also called PSC, aiming at ensuring the foreign visiting ships to comply
with various international and regional maritime conventions and reg-
ulations, is regarded as an effective safety net to catch substandard ships
(IMO, 2021b). PSC is one of the most important international maritime
policies, and various ML models have been developed to improve the
effectiveness and efficiency of PSC inspection. Most of the studies aim at
achieving accurate identification of high-risk visiting ships by predicting
ship risks of various types (e.g., the number of deficiencies and the
detention probability) by ML models including BNs (Yang et al., 2018;
Wang et al., 2019), SVMs (Xu et al., 2007; Wu et al., 2021), and
tree-based models (Yan et al., 2020b, 2021a, 2021b, 2021a). In addition,
onboard inspection sequence is optimized based on association rule
mining techniques (Tsou, 2019; Chung et al., 2020; Osman et al., 2020;
Yan et al., 2021d), which belong to typical UL models. Additionally, we
note that BNs are also popular in analyzing the influencing factors of
detention (Yang et al., 2021), evaluating the effectiveness of PSC on
reducing ship accidents (H€anninen et al., 2014a; Li et al., 2014; Fan et al.,
2019), and quantifying the improvement of navigation safety brought by
R. Yan et al.
PSC inspections (H€ anninen and Kujala, 2014b; Fan et al., 2020). As a
typical PSC inspection usually lasts two to 3 h, while only one record is
generated for an inspection, the data quantity is quite limited. Therefore,
to the best of the authors’ knowledge, there is no study developing DL
models to address practical problems in PSC.
5.1.4. Ship energy efficiency prediction
In recent years, ship fuel consumption prediction and optimization
have received an increased emphasis as a result of stricter vessel emission
regulations, cyclical downturn of the world economy, and high bunker
prices (Yan et al., 2021c). Vessel fuel consumption is widely considered
the foundation of the following voyage management and optimization
such as speed optimization, trim optimization, and sailing path planning.
However, achieving accurate predictions of fuel consumption in different
environments is not a trivial task as various factors, e.g., vessel sailing
speed, engine and hull conditions, cargo loaded, and the surrounding sea
and weather conditions, could influence vessel fuel consumption in a
complex manner (Du et al., 2019; Yan et al., 2021c). Therefore, to cap-
ture their intricate interrelations, ML models have been widely applied to
predict vessel fuel consumption rates in various scenarios. For example,
Pedersen and Larsen (2009) is the pioneer study on applying ANN for
vessel fuel consumption prediction considering sailing speed, wind,
wave, air and water temperature, and draft conditions. ANNs are widely
developed and are by far the most popular ML model for fuel consump-
tion prediction in existing literature (Yan et al., 2021c), which can be
found in Petersen (2011), Rudzki and Tarelko (2016), Du et al. (2019),
€
Farag and Olçer (2020), and Le et al. (2020). Other SL models developed
to predict ship fuel consumption rates include tree-based models (Peng
et al., 2020; Yan et al., 2020a), least absolute shrinkage and selection
operator (LASSO) regression (Wang et al., 2018; Gkerekos et al., 2019;
Soner et al., 2019; Uyanık et al., 2020), ridge regression (Soner et al.,
2019; Uyanık et al., 2020), and SVR (Uyanık et al., 2020). UL models are
also constructed for vessel fuel consumption prediction, such as
self-organizing maps (SOM) (Man et al., 2020), Gaussian mixture model
(GMM) (Petersen, 2011), and fuzzy c-means clustering (Tran, 2020). DL
models are only employed by a very limited number of studies including
Panapakidis et al. (2020) which combined LSTM, RNN, and Elman neural
network (ENN). By utilizing the vessel fuel consumption prediction re-
sults, downstream voyage optimization models are developed to deter-
mine the optimal sailing speeds (Du et al., 2019; Zheng et al., 2019; Yan
et al., 2020a), vessel engine settings (Rudzki and Tarelko, 2016; Wang
et al., 2016), trim conditions (Du et al., 2019), and sailing routes (Zhang
et al., 2019). A recent comprehensive review on vessel fuel consumption
prediction approaches can be found in Yan et al. (2021c).
Emissions of gases and particles resulted by ship fuel consumption in
port areas can be a source of localized ocean acidification and a threat to
human health (Wang et al., 2021; Zhuge et al., 2021). However, to the
best of the authors’ knowledge, there are quite few studies on the use of
ML and DL models to predict ship fuel consumption or emissions in port
areas. One such study is Schaub et al. (2019), where ANN is applied to
predict vessel emissions when maneuvering to enter or leave a port.
5.1.5. Ocean freight market condition prediction
As a proxy for dry bulk shipping stocks as well as a general shipping
market bellwether, BDI within different time frames are forecasted by
several existing studies using emerging approaches. In particular, two
machine learning models are widely adopted: ANNs (Leonov and Niko-
lov, 2012; Zeng et al., 2016; Şahin et al., 2018; Bae et al., 2021) and SVRs
(Han et al., 2014; Bao et al., 2016) while considering various influencing
factors such as BDIs in the past period, iron ore freight volume, coal price,
charter rates, and new building development, to name just a few.
Another popular prediction target in related studies is sea freight rate,
which is the requested price for the transport of cargo from one place to
another by sea and is mainly determined by the weight and volume of the
cargo and the distance to the destination. ANNs are the most popular
prediction models of sea freight rate which can be found in von
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Communications in Transportation Research 1 (2021) 100011
_
Spreckelsen et al. (2014), Santos et al. (2014), Uyar and Ilhan (2016),
and Yang and Mehmed (2019). Moreover, several ML models are
developed for comparison in Ubaid et al. (2020), including SVR, RF, and
GBR, and in Næss (2018), including ANN, MLP, RNN, and LSTM. One
may note that in all the literature covered in this subsection so far, apart
from Næss (2018), where DL models are used for the prediction of ocean
freight market conditions, all the other studies only use ML models. This
is mainly caused by the limited data that can be obtained: Most of these
studies have no more than 1,000 records in the whole dataset, while
massive AIS data are used in Næss (2018) to support the use of DL models
for freight rate prediction.
We also note that regarding other shipping markets in the interna-
tional shipping industry, i.e., the sale and purchase market, the new-
building market, and the demolition market, emerging approaches are
seldomly applied. Instead, classic economic models and econometric
models are widely applied in forecasting or estimating tasks as model
explainability and significance test are of vital importance.
5.2. Emerging approaches applied to address problems in the port side
5.2.1. Ship destination and arrival time prediction
Although the voyage destination and the corresponding ETA are
required to be reported via AIS, it has been shown that the accuracy is
low and are therefore of very limited use (Yang et al., 2021). Therefore,
achieving accurate ship destination and arrival time prediction is of
significant importance. Accurate predictions are beneficial to several
stakeholders in maritime transportation, such as cargo senders, for-
warders and hinterland carriers, terminal operators, port authorities, and
shipping lines. One should note that the prediction of voyage destination
and the prediction of the arrival time to a port have different focuses: The
destination of a certain voyage is unknown and is the prediction target of
the former, while the destination is already known in the latter. Mean-
while, it is also noted that these two issues are addressed together in
some existing studies as both are influenced by some common external
factors, such as ship characteristics, historical and current vessel trajec-
tories, sailing speed, weather and sea conditions, and the departure port
of the voyage.
Studies on ship destination prediction based on AIS can be divided
into two categories: turning point based and trajectory extraction based.
Regarding the first category, a framework for anomaly detection and
route prediction called TREAD is developed by Pallotta et al. (2013).
Another study is based on density-based spatial clustering of applications
with noise (DBSCAN) for turning region clustering and ANN for next
turning point predicting (Daranda, 2016). There are more exiting studies
within the second category. For example, several joint vessel destination
and arrival time prediction models based on vessel trajectory extraction
using data streams produced by AIS and ML models are proposed in the
2018 Grand Challenge, and the representatives can be found in Amariei
et al. (2018), Lin et al. (2018), Bodunov et al. (2018), and Nguyen et al.
(2018). ML models are developed in most of the studies, while a DNN
model is developed for vessel travel time prediction in Lin et al. (2018).
The destination prediction in the above studies is all at a regional level.
Zhang et al. (2020a) proposed a global-level vessel destination prediction
model based on RF to evaluate trajectory similarities, and the destination
port with the highest probability was recommended by further consid-
ering port frequency. More recently, Jia et al. (2021) adopted classifi-
cation models such as RF and GBRT to predict the destination of global
crude oil exports using cargo information, vessel information,
geographical information, and macroeconomic data, while vessel tra-
jectory data are excluded.
Several prediction tasks can be viewed as the equivalents of ship
arrival time predictions, including late arrival or delay prediction, arrival
punctuality prediction, and early arrival prediction, although they can be
either regression or classification problem, while the ship arrival time
prediction is a regression problem. As liner ships follow fixed routes and
schedules, most of the current studies on port arrival time prediction are
R. Yan et al.
designed within the context of container terminals and are based on
classic ML models such as ANNs (e.g., Fancello et al., 2011; Parolas,
2016; Parolas et al., 2017; Meijer, 2017; Viellechner and Spinler, 2020),
RFs (e.g., Cannas et al., 2013; Pani et al., 2015; Yu et al., 2018; Bussmann,
2019; Viellechner and Spinler, 2020), SVMs (e.g., Meijer, 2017; Viel-
lechner and Spinler, 2020), and BNs (e.g., Salleh et al., 2017). There are
also a small number of ship arrival time prediction models designed for
all types of ships, which can be found in Kim et al. (2017) using refined
case-based reasoning and in El Mekkaoui et al. (2020) using ANN. Based
on the prediction of port arrival time, port operation optimization models
are developed, which can be found in Fancello et al. (2011) for opti-
mizing port human resource allocation and Yu et al. (2018) for improving
daily port operation planning. Besides, the benefits of accurate ship
arrival time prediction are analyzed from both qualitative and quanti-
tative perspectives in Parolas (2016), Meijer (2017), Parolas et al.
(2017), and Bussmann (2019). Ship arrival time prediction models are
not only developed in existing academic literature, but also dealt in
cooperated projects between the government and the industry, such as
SAFER carried out by the Singapore Maritime and Port Authority and the
IBM Research Singapore Laboratory (Yeo et al., 2019).
5.2.2. Port condition prediction
Emerging approaches have been applied to predict port conditions
and thus to improve port management efficiency to a certain (but
limited) extent. For example, regarding shipping demand prediction,
ANN and the combination of ANN and SARIMAX are applied to predict
domestic shipping demand of cement (Fışkın and Cerit, 2019). Both ML
(SVR and RF) and DL (LSTM) models are developed for the prediction of
liquid bulk cargo volume using bill of lading data (Kim et al., 2021).
ANNs combined with time series methods (Zhang et al., 2021) as well as
SVRs (Ruiz-Aguilar et al., 2020) are also applied to predict port cargo
volume. Regarding port traffic volume prediction, AIS data are used to
predict daily ship traffic volume at the Shanghai port by using ANNs
(Wang et al., 2017). In addition, outbound truck traffic flows at major
container terminals at the port of Rotterdam are also predicted by ANNs
(Nadi et al., 2021).
6. Issues in applying emerging approaches to practical maritime
transport problems
There are four layers associated with developing emerging ap-
proaches to address practical maritime transport problems, as shown in
Fig. 1, i.e., data, model, users, and targets, and each layer is nested into
the next one. Relevant data must be collected, then using the data, a
Fig. 1. Layers of the development of emerging approaches.
7
Communications in Transportation Research 1 (2021) 100011
model is built; after that, users of the model, based on the model output,
make decisions; finally, the decisions will be applied to the targets. We
first examine the challenges associated with each layer with examples
provided (most of them are from PSC inspection), and then some possible
solutions are discussed.
6.1. Data
First, data sources used for the development of emerging approach
based solution should be compatible with the focus of the problem. This
means that the data sources should not be too limited and hence unable
to cover the full picture, nor too wide so as to contain interference
information.
Example of selection of features: To predict ship risk level in PSC in-
spection, ship generic factors, such as the ship dimensions (e.g., length,
beam, depth, and draft), their flag, data on the management company,
operator information, and vessel casualties are useful and necessary to
evaluate the ship risk, as they are highly related to the ship’s structural
condition, the safety of navigation, and safety management which are the
key points of PSC. In contrast, ship operation information, such as the
ship’s sailing route, the average sailing speed over the voyages, the
freight rate, and the charter mode should deserve less attention since the
cost of obtaining these data can be very high, while the port authorities
are not so much interested in such information when selecting high-risk
ships for inspection.
Example of selection of output variable: In the context of high-risk ship
identification and selection in PSC inspection, the goal is to enhance
maritime safety, to protect the marine environment, and to guarantee
good living and working conditions for seafarers through ship inspection.
Therefore, the ship risk level should be evaluated by related risk in-
dicators, e.g., the number of deficiencies detected, the probability of
detention (or fatal deficiencies detected), and the probability of maritime
incidents or accidents involvement, as opposed to other types of risks
such as pirate attacks, since this has nothing to do with the goal of PSC.
Second, after collecting proper data, data preprocessing is essential as
real-world datasets are usually noisy, featured with missing values and
data errors. As an important part of feature engineering, dealing with
missing values and errors effectively in specific problem settings can
sometimes be a challenge as different methods are suitable to different
problems. Common methods used to address missing values in raw data
together with the examples are provided in Table 3. It should be
mentioned that some emerging approaches themselves can process
missing values, with tree-based models as a representative/example.
Data errors can be classified into four categories: outliers, duplicates,
rule violations, and pattern violations. We focus on methods dealing with
outliers, which refer to data values that deviate significantly from the
distribution of the values of a feature. We briefly summarize common
methods to detect outliers in data as follows.

z-score
The z-score of a feature value is a metric which indicates how many
standard deviations the feature value is from all the feature values’ mean
by assuming that they follow a Gaussian distribution. If the z-score of a
feature value is beyond a given threshold, which is usually 2.5, 3, or 3.5,
the corresponding record is regarded as an outlier.

Interquartile range (IQR)
The IQR is used to measure variability in data. Data values are first
sorted in ascending order and split into four equal parts, where Q1, Q2,
and Q3 refer to the 25th, 50th, and 75th percentile of the data, respec-
tively. IQR is defined as the first and the third quartile, i.e., IQR ¼ Q3 –
Q1. Data points which fall below Q1 – 1.5  IQR and above Q3 þ
1.5  IQR are regarded as outliers. IQR can be applied together with
boxplot for data distribution visualization to achieve more intuitive
outlier detection.
R. Yan et al. Communications in Transportation Research 1 (2021) 100011

Table 3 Table 3 (continued )

Summary of methods to deal with missing values in datasets. Method Description Example Note
Method Description Example Note
missing and 0,
Re-obtaining Query the specific PSC inspection: If the Data format of otherwise.
of missing missing fields from dimension external data Imputation Fill missing values Ship energy efficiency
data other data sources information of a sources may not be for time- using the last or prediction: If the
certain vessel is in consistent with series data next observed value field ‘draft’ is
missing in the the original data in time series data, absent in a noon
database provided format. or the mean of the report, it can be
by the last and next values replaced by using
corresponding (which is also called the ‘draft’ value
MoU, one may linear from the noon
search the related interpolation) report of either the
information of the previous day or the
specific vessel from next day, or the
external ship mean of the
specification previous day and
databases, such as the next day, if they
Lloyd’s List belong to the same
Intelligence and voyage.
Shipping Multiple Multiple imputation The working
Intelligence imputation is a statistical mechanism of
Network. technique based on multiple imputation
Discarding Delete the records Ship energy efficiency If there is a large the distribution of is complex and is
data and the features prediction: If there is enough dataset the observed data to hard to be
with too many a ship sailing record while few records estimate a set of illustrated by
missing values generated by are with many plausible values for examples. Readers
directly from the onboard sensors missing fields, the missing data are referred to
whole dataset with only the record deletion is a Rubin (1996), and
current common and Schafer (1999), and
geographical effective way. Royston (2004) for
location available, Meanwhile, when more information.
while all the other there are many Regression Predict missing PSC inspection: If there are several
fields missing due records with values of a certain Suppose there are features with
to transmission missing values feature using several missing missing values, they
failure, the record while the regression values for feature can be addressed in
could be deleted distribution of the approaches ‘age’ in the dataset. turn. One should
from the whole records are not First, predictors of also care about the
dataset. random, record ‘age’ are identified overfit problem as
PSC inspection: deletion might using a correlation the feature value is
Suppose one would cause bias. matrix. A regression predicted from
like to incorporate There is no rule of model, e.g., linear other features.
ship draft thumb for feature regression, is
information as an deletion, while one constructed by the
indicator of ship should keep in mind predictors selected
dimension for risk that dropping as the input and
prediction. feature might lead ‘age’ as the output.
However, the draft to (heavy)
field of more than information loss.
half of the ships is
UL techniques
missing in the In unsupervised settings, the training data are deemed to consist of
available ship
both normal and outlier data points while they are unlabeled. One typical
specification
database. Under outlier detection method is clustering, which is based on the assumption
this condition, one that normal clusters contain much larger number of records, while
can delete this anomalous clusters contain much less records as outliers are only asso-
feature from the ciated to a small percentage of the total data with distinct feature values.
whole dataset.
Imputation Fill missing values PSC inspection: If Record similarity
Popular clustering algorithms used for outlier detection include k-means,
for non- using mean, there is a container could be evaluated fuzzy c-means, k-NN, and DBSCAN. Except for clustering methods, other
time-series median, or mode of ship with missing by methods such as types of UL techniques include self-organizing maps, one-class SVM, and
data the corresponding ‘age’ value, one k-means clustering isolation forest.
features over all or could use the mean, and distance
After outlier detection, whether to remove them from the dataset or
similar record(s) in median, or mode of measurements.
the dataset ‘age’ of all ships in Moreover, one more revise them are worthy of a more careful investigation. On the one hand,
the dataset, or the binary feature outliers may be caused by data collection and measurement errors,
mean, median, or indicating whether sampling problems, and natural variations, and thus distort the perfor-
mode of ‘age’ of all each record has mance of the prediction models developed. On the other hand, the
container ships to missing value
fill this missing regarding a certain
detected outliers may contain valuable and irreplaceable information,
value. feature can be hence deleting them directly could cause serious information loss.
added after
conducting
imputation based 6.2. Model
on statistical
estimates, which
takes 1 if it is First, the applicable scenarios of DL and ML models are different. As
the structure of DL models is usually much more complex than tradi-
tional ML models (as they have a larger number of layers in a neural

8
R. Yan et al.
network with many nodes in each layer, while the nodes are inter-
connected with each other in an intricate manner), they need much
more data for model training according to the Vapnik–Chervonenkis
(VC) dimension theory (Abu-Mostafa, 1989). Meanwhile, due to the
sophisticated and versatile structure of DL models, they are more
suitable to non-structural data such as audio, image, text, and video
than traditional ML models. Table 2 suggests that various types of ML
models, especially linear regression models, SVMs, ANNs, tree-based
models, and k-NNs have been widely adopted by studies on maritime
transport, while only basic types of DL models, e.g., CNN, RNN, and
LSTM are developed in related studies. Particularly, DL models are
usually applied to problems where adequate data can be obtained from
AIS (e.g., in ship trajectory prediction and ship risk prediction) and
onboard sensors (e.g., in ship energy efficiency prediction). In contrast,
it is noted that no DL model has been developed for ship inspection
planning. The main reason is that the cost of generating one ship in-
spection record is very high. Taking the port of Hong Kong as an
example, PSC inspection is conducted purely by manpower, and a
typical PSC inspection usually lasts two to 3 h, while the average hourly
cost of a (follow-up) inspection is over 150 USD (Tokyo MoU, 2016).
Moreover, even as one of the largest and busiest ports over the world,
usually no more than five inspections were conducted on each working
day at the port of Hong Kong before the COVID-19. Therefore, no more
than 1,000 records can be generated per year. It can be concluded that
DL models are not suitable to be applied to all practical problems in
maritime transport. Instead, they are suitable to be applied in problems
where massive data can be obtained while the cost of data acquisition is
acceptable, or to problems featured with unstructured data.
Second, how to develop a proper emerging approach to solve a certain
problem in maritime transport is not a trivial task. To begin with, the
category of problem needs to be decided, e.g., classification, regression,
clustering, or association rule mining. Then, models falling within certain
categories should be tried and evaluated. One tricky issue in this step is
how to decide model parameters and tune model hyperparameters. After
model construction, model performance should be evaluated by proper
metrics.
Example: Suppose one aims to develop an ML model to predict ship
detention probability in PSC inspection. This is obviously a classification
problem, while one challenge is that the detention rate is very low, which
is usually no more than 5%. This indicates that on average, only five ships
are detained after inspecting 100 ships. Therefore, the dataset is highly
imbalanced, that is, ships with detention heavily outnumber ships
without detention. Considering this characteristic, either data pre-
processing methods to form a balanced dataset or data-driven models
with special structure able to deal with this issue should be applied.
Moreover, metrics to evaluate the performance of classification models
dealing with imbalanced datasets should be adopted. For example, ac-
curacy, which is the most widely used metric to evaluate the performance
of normal classification models, is not proper in this case. Instead, recall,
precision, and F1 score could be used. An existing representative study
addressing the problem of ship detention problem is Yan et al. (2021b).
Third, most of the emerging approaches are associated with the
property of ‘black-box’, which means that the model working mechanism
and prediction results cannot be understood by humans (while BN is a
typical exception as it can be visualized and thus partially explainable). It
is expected that the emerging approaches should possess the property of
explainability (or interpretability), which aims to make the internal
mechanisms of an automation ‘black-box’ model and the prediction re-
sults understandable to a human. It is well known that when models are
not conceived with self-explanatory characteristics, they may engender
pitfalls. Therefore, the explainability of a black-box model could bridge
the gap between making a prediction and making a decision, which is
highly related to the ultimate goal of applying it to practical maritime
problems (Athey, 2017). In some cases, explainability can even be as
important as the accuracy of a black-box model. As a matter of fact, the
explainability of a data-driven model largely determines its application
9
Communications in Transportation Research 1 (2021) 100011
prospect as it is almost impossible for conservative practitioners to trust
and use a model without knowing its working mechanism (Molnar,
2021). The requirement of model explainability is particularly important
in maritime policy-related applications due to the complex structure of
the maritime industry which involves several stakeholders. According to
Doshi-Velez and Kim (2017), interpretability stems from “incomplete-
ness”, which creates a fundamental barrier to optimization and evalua-
tion. These authors claim that model explainability becomes unnecessary
only under two conditions: 1) Unacceptable results will not cause sig-
nificant consequences in a model, and 2) the problem is sufficiently well
studied and validated in real applications, so that the stakeholders trust
the system’s recommendations. However, for most of the policy-making
processes in the traditional and conservative maritime industry, neither
condition can be met.
Example: For the first condition, since a typical PSC inspection usually
takes several hours, if a ship is selected for inspection, the shipping
schedule may be delayed, which will affect both carriers and shippers.
Therefore, if low-risk ships are wrongly identified as high-risk ships by
the model and are frequently inspected, ship owners and operators will
be less motivated to keep their ship in satisfactory condition and may
even cause conflicts between their shipping company and the port state.
In contrast, if a substandard ship of very low quality cannot be accurately
identified by the model and is not inspected before leaving the port, then
a threat to maritime safety will arise. Regarding the second condition,
since shipping is a relatively traditional industry, policy making is mainly
assisted by expert systems instead of emerging approaches, and the
stakeholders’ trust in emerging approaches as well as in their predictions
is still very weak. Consequently, only when the internal working process
of the emerging approaches and the prediction results generated become
explainable to the users, can these models be trusted and used by them.
However, explainability to non-technical personnel, who are usually the
model users, could turn out to be a major challenge, as different audi-
ences expect various levels of explanations.
Although the development of explainable emerging approach based
models is a relatively new research topic which is not that well studied,
there are currently several strategies to improve model explainability,
such as developing intrinsically interpretable models like linear regres-
sion and decision trees, providing summary statistics and visualization,
clearing the model internal working mechanisms, and analyzing single-
data points (Molnar, 2021). The advantages of explainable black-box
emerging approaches are easier debugging and improvement, clari-
fying the model fairness, ensuring privacy protection, increasing model
reliability and robustness, enhancing users’ trust, and allowing further
investigation (Doshi-Velez and Kim, 2017).
6.3. Users
One guiding principle for the use of emerging approach-based models
is to avoid imposing any burden or pressure on the users, as applying
emerging approaches usually means replacing the current (naïve)
method. In the context of maritime transport, the developers and users
are usually different. On the one hand, emerging approaches are usually
developed by engineers or researchers with data analysis and shipping
backgrounds, and they usually feature multifarious inputs and outputs as
well as complex structures, which means that the data processing and
model operation can be sophisticated. On the other hand, the users of
these models are usually practitioners of maritime transport, such as
government officials, technicians in shipping companies, and crew
members, who may lack expertise in data acquisition and processing, in
addition to model operation. It is therefore crucial to avoid requiring the
users to input external data and carrying out too many extra operations
when using the models. Ideally, a straightforward and friendly graphical
user interface should be provided for easier human-computer interaction,
with little input information needed, and direct output generated.
Example: In a decision support tool developed for ship selection in
PSC, to facilitate interactions between the emerging approach and the
R. Yan et al.
users, a website-based online decision support tool with easy access was
developed11. All the data used by the system are retrieved automatically
from the information system employed by that port state and a popular
database providing common ship specifications. This means the users can
read or download the outputs of the model without doing anything (e.g.,
without inputting any data or running the model). As a consequence, the
use of the emerging approach is consistent with the users’ past working
habits and does not pose any extra operational burden.
Another issue associated with the users of emerging approaches is the
lack of universal applicability of a certain model, as the model is usually
constructed using the data of a certain geographic region or from a
certain ship or port. Since different entities are associated with different
characteristics, a data-driven prediction model constructed based on the
dataset collected from one entity is hard to be applied to predict the
future conditions of another entity. If one wants to extend a developed
model for one certain entity to another, new data need to be collected,
while the parameters and hyperparameters of the model should also be
updated. Alternatively, innovative techniques such as transfer learning
can be applied.
Example: Suppose there is a developed ML model to predict the
number of deficiencies of foreign visiting ships to the Hong Kong port
using Hong Kong’s historical inspection records. If one directly applies
this model to another port, e.g., the port of Shanghai, it is highly likely
that the prediction performance will be low. The main reason is that
inspectors at different ports usually have different backgrounds and thus
expertise, and the inspection focuses varies at different port authorities,
and as a result, the number of deficiencies detected on one ship could be
quite different if inspected by different ports. To apply the developed ML
model in order to predict ship deficiency number at the port of Shanghai,
one can collect inspection records at the port of Shanghai and re-train the
ML model, with proper adjustment of model parameters and
hyperparameters.
6.4. Targets
Fairness to the targets is also a key issue of the application of
emerging approaches to practical maritime problems. As the decision-
making process in the traditional maritime sector is largely based on
widely accepted rules gained from long-term experience and shipping
domain knowledge, the results offered by models without applying such
rules will be deemed unfair to the targets and will therefore have a lower
applicability.
Example: In developing a high-risk ship selection decision support tool
for PSC, ships with a worse management company, recognized organi-
zation, or flag performance should be predicted to be of higher risk when
all the other factors are the same (e.g., ship age, type, and performance in
historical inspections), that is, the output is monotonic with some fea-
tures. Fair prediction in line with domain knowledge is crucial for the
effectiveness of the application of the ship risk prediction model: If the
ships recommended by the model for inspection were not those that
should be inspected according to domain knowledge (i.e., ships with a
worse management company, recognized organization, or flag perfor-
mances), ship owners might consider the model to be unfair and lack the
motivation to intensively maintain ship conditions; this result would
contradict the goal of PSC to motivate ship owners to carry out high-
quality shipping (Yan et al., 2021a).
However, as practical data are usually featured with errors and noises
and are of limited quantity, domain knowledge may not be perfectly
captured by data-driven models developed based on emerging ap-
proaches. To effectively incorporate such domain knowledge, tailored
data-driven models could be developed by modifying the model structure
or imposing constraints in the model development process. For example,
11
https://sites.google.com/site/wangshuaian/research-interest/ai-for-psc-at-h
ong-kong.
10
Communications in Transportation Research 1 (2021) 100011
Yan et al. (2021a) developed a state-of-the-art ML model called XGBoost
with monotonic constraints on certain features regarding the prediction
target for high-risk ships in order to generate prediction results
complying with shipping domain knowledge.
7. Future research directions
Based on the above review and discussion, we further propose the
following directions for future research regarding the application of
emerging approaches to practical problems in maritime transport from
the perspectives of data, model, users, and targets.
From the perspective of data, which is the foundation of the devel-
opment of data-driven based emerging approaches, the above review
shows that there are quite limited free public data in the maritime in-
dustry. This is not surprising as there are a significant number of different
and independent actors in the maritime transportation, while each of
these is only willing to sharing similar related data when it advances their
self-interest and preserves what is seen by them as a competitive edge. As
indicated by Table 2, free public data sources are mainly provided by
maritime institutions, i.e., port authorities, PSC MoUs, and the IMO
regarding port statistics, PSC inspection records, and ship accident data
in their central databases. However, we also note that collecting data
from these databases may be time-consuming, as frequent queries and
copy-paste operations are needed. Other data sources are either from
commercial companies with high annual subscription fee (e.g., AIS, ship
specifications, sea and weather data) or provided by port and shipping
companies in an anonymous way (e.g., ship sailing records). Obviously,
there are digital inefficiencies in maritime transport chains. Therefore, to
facilitate more in-depth emerging approach-based research on maritime
transport, “it is paramount that all the actors involved share their related
intentions proactively in real-time to facilitate seamless interactions”
(UNCTAD, 2018). This encourages digital collaborations between
ship-to-port, port-to-port, and port-to-hinterland data sharing.
From the perspective of modeling, future studies adopting emerging
approaches should focus more on incorporating shipping domain
knowledge into data-driven prediction models. In existing studies,
domain knowledge has been considered to achieve precise and accurate
problem definition, high-quality data collection, effective data pre-
processing and feature engineering, and interpretation of prediction re-
sults. Nevertheless, comprehensive consideration of the specific shipping
domain knowledge and the preference of model users are rare in the
modeling process, including model choice, model structuring, and
parameter setting. For example, in vessel fuel consumption prediction,
shipping domain knowledge tells us that the relationship between fuel
consumption and sailing speed should be convex and monotonic.
Nevertheless, predictions given by emerging approaches may be opposite
due to noises in data and model ineffectiveness. Such a violation would
limit the acceptance and application of the developed model by the
practitioners in maritime industry. Although how to efficiently incor-
porate domain knowledge into data-driven models is still an open
question and a research hotspot, it can be achieved by adjusting model
structure, imposing constraints, post-hoc revising prediction results in
rudimental application (Yan et al., 2020a, 2021a, 2021a).
From the perspective of users, much more efforts should be made to
bridge the gap between making a prediction and making a decision
through improving explainability of ‘black-box’ data-driven models
(Athey, 2017). It is not difficult to open up these ‘black-box’ models to a
certain extent via existing methods for model explanation, which can be
classified as intrinsic and post hoc considering the application period,
model-specific and model-agnostic considering the application range,
and local and global considering the scope of interpretation (Molnar,
2021). Nevertheless, we also note that achieving precise and
human-understandable explanations of ‘black-box’ models as well as
evaluating the performance of such explanations are still open questions
(Doshi-Velez and Kim, 2017). Furthermore, providing effective expla-
nations of the prediction models and results to maritime practitioners,
R. Yan et al.
who are usually laymen in data analytics but with rich industrial expe-
rience as well as generating impactful management insights could be
even more difficult. Therefore, providing user-centered explanations of
‘black-box’ models in the traditional maritime industry is worthy of more
exploration.
Finally, from the perspective of targets, a wider range of practical
maritime problems should be addressed using emerging approaches in
future studies. Table 2 indicates that only a few maritime problems have
been dealt with by adopting emerging approaches with the focus on
prediction tasks. Several important issues from both shipping and port
sides have not yet been considered using emerging approaches. For
example, from the shipping side, vessel routing and scheduling, fleet
planning and development, and shipping network design, which are the
determinants of the competitiveness of shipping companies, have not yet
been optimized by emerging approaches. Several issues in vessel man-
agement, e.g., labor employment and shipping service management are
also not addressed by emerging approaches. Fewer topics are covered in
the port side. Even if vessel destination and arrival time prediction at the
regional level are achieved in several existing studies, there are few
studies at the global level. Moreover, most of these studies are concerned
with liner ships with a fixed route and schedule (and thus it can be ex-
pected that such prediction could be much easier), while little effort has
been made for tramp ships. Consequently, there are relatively few
emerging approach-based models for port congestion prediction, port
resource allocation management, and port risk and security prediction
with ship destination and arrival time predictions as the foundation.
Similarly, as little research exists on the prediction of port throughput in
the near or far future, predicting and evaluating port competitiveness as
well as managing port development is rare. Moreover, it can be expected
that as more accurate and timely forecasts and predictions can be ach-
ieved by emerging approaches compared with traditional approaches,
cases in more complex context, e.g., optimization of ad hoc shipping
services (where accurate shipping demand and port condition pre-
dictions with uncertainties are required) can be handled more effectively
and efficiently.
8. Conclusions
This essay first summarizes the existing research topics on maritime
transport and the classic approaches developed to address them. It then
briefly introduces emerging technologies, i.e., ML and DL models, as well
as their application to the solution of practical maritime problems in the
existing academic literature. Particularly, we classify problems in mari-
time transport into two main categories—shipping and port—and give an
overview of representatives in each category. Common data sources used
to address these problems are also introduced. Based on the broad-range
review, we further discuss issues in applying emerging approaches for
practical maritime transport problems from the perspectives of data,
model, users, and targets. Major challenges and their solutions from each
perspective are discussed and illustrated by examples from PSC inspec-
tion. Finally, we outline some promising future research directions of
adopting emerging approaches to solve practical problems in maritime
transport, also from the perspectives of data, model, users, and targets.
This essay is the first to provide a comprehensive review of existing
studies on developing ML and DL models together with popular data
sources used to handle practical problems in maritime transport. We
believe that although there are inevitable challenges, with the rapid
advancement of digitization in the maritime industry, emerging ap-
proaches will become more and more prevailing in the near future.
Declaration of competing interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial
interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence
the work reported in this paper.
11
Communications in Transportation Research 1 (2021) 100011
Acknowledgements
The authors thank the editor and the reviewer for their constructive
comments on improving this manuscript. This research is supported by
the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant numbers
72025103, 71831008, 72071173).
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Ran Yan is a PhD candidate at The Hong Kong Polytechnic
University (PolyU). Her research interests include data ana-
lytics in shipping, big data in shipping, and green shipping
management.
Shuaian (Hans) Wang is a Professor at The Hong Kong Poly-
technic University (PolyU). His research interests include
shipping operations management, green shipping, big data in
shipping, port planning and operations, urban transport
network modeling, and logistics and supply chain management.
He dedicates to rethinking and proposing innovative solutions
to improve the efficiency of maritime and urban transportation
systems, to promote environmental friendly and sustainable
practices, and to transform business and engineering education.
R. Yan et al.
Lu Zhen is a Professor and Dean in the School of Management at
Shanghai University. His research interests include logistics and
supply chain management, operations research, optimization in
port and shipping management. He has published more than 90
SCI and SSCI journal papers on some reputable journals. He has
served as an associate editor or an editorial board member of
five SCI/SSC journals such as TR Part B, JORS, COR; and he is
also the Fellow of the Operational Research Society.
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Communications in Transportation Research 1 (2021) 100011
Gilbert Laporte is a Full Professor of at University of Bath.
Laporte has been awarded the Order of Canada and the Innis-
G
erin Medal. In 2019, Laporte was elected a member of the
National Academy of Engineering for domain-defining contri-
butions to the theory and practice of vehicle routing, facility
location, and distribution management.