The global shipping network is the worldwide network of maritime traffic. From a network science perspective ports represent nodes and routes represent lines. Transportation networks have a crucial role in today's economy, more precisely, maritime traffic is one of the most important drivers of global trade.
90% of world trade is transported on water [1] and in 2012, the most heavily trafficked sea route saw ships travel predominantly from China to the West Coast of the United States. [2]
As with every network, maritime traffic can be also viewed through a network scientist's glass. Ports can be regarded as nodes and the paths ferries travelling on are the lines. If this network is just as any other like railway or airport networks, one can have valid statements about its operation. The ocean's traffic system also has its routes, gateways, some of which functioning as a major hub or interconnection. [1]
A paper by Kaluza et al. [3] investigates cargo ship movements on real data. They use data on all major ports and the largest ships, that can be regarded as the majority of the shipping transport – it contains 93% of the total world capacity of cargo ship transport. Here, "each trajectory can be interpreted as a small directed network where the nodes are ports linked together if the ship travelled directly between ports". The weights of the links between i and j ports are the potential space of the ships travelling between them.
The global directed ship network's prominent characteristics is that it is asymmetric – as 59% of the linked pairs have only one direction. The routes are short – there is no need for a lot of steps to get from one port to another, as the average path length is 2.5, with maximum of 8 and 52% of the pairs can be connected by two steps. This is much more fewer than in the case of airport networks as both the average and the maximum are significantly higher: 4.4 and 15 respectively. (Guimera et al. [4] )
The shipping network is highly clustered, its clustering coefficient is 0.49, which can be interpreted that any given node's neighbors are also connected to each other. The average number of links of a node is 76.5, which is much higher as opposed to the airport network, that is 19.4. These facts show that shipping networks are denser, which also gives a higher robustness to it. As many real-world networks it also has the property of having a lot of nodes with only a few links but some having extremely lot of links. Although it is not exactly a scale-free network, the distribution of link weights follows a power law. The distribution of the nodes strength (average link weights arriving and departing from port i) also follows a power law, which means that only a few ports manage immense amounts of cargo. [3]
Betweenness centrality is another important concept. It is basically the sum of the directed paths in the network that pass through a particular node. Ports with high betweenness are quite important. Such nodes are the Panama and Suez canals or Shanghai and Antwerp. [3]
There are also differences between the main ship types: container ships, bulk dry carriers and oil tankers. These differences reflect to the fact that they follow distinctive traffic patterns. While container ships typically follow set schedules with fixed path for a regular service, dry carriers change their routes more often. Furthermore, container ships are much faster than the other categories - average days spent in the port is 1.9 in contrast to 5.6 of bulk dry carriers or 4.6 of oil tankers. The proper kind of ports also affect the properties of the possible network. [3]
Nigeria’s transport network has expanded in recent years to accommodate a growing population. The transport and storage sector was valued at N2.6trn ($6.9bn) in current basic prices in 2020, down from N3trn ($8bn) in 2019, according to the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS). This was reflected in a lower contribution to GDP, at 1.8% in the fourth quarter of 2020, down from 2.1% during the same period the previous year but higher than the 0.8% recorded in the third quarter of 2020. One of the most significant challenges facing the sector is meeting the needs of both large coastal cities and rural inland communities in order to fully unlock the country’s economic potential. This is especially the case with mining and agriculture, both of which are expected to benefit from two large-scale projects: the Lekki Port in Lagos and the Kano-Maradi rail line in the north of the country.
Freight transport, also referred as freight forwarding, is the physical process of transporting commodities and merchandise goods and cargo. The term shipping originally referred to transport by sea but in American English, it has been extended to refer to transport by land or air as well. "Logistics", a term borrowed from the military environment, is also used in the same sense.
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A container ship is a cargo ship that carries all of its load in truck-size intermodal containers, in a technique called containerization. Container ships are a common means of commercial intermodal freight transport and now carry most seagoing non-bulk cargo.
Mitsui O.S.K. Lines is a Japanese transport company headquartered in Toranomon, Minato, Tokyo, Japan. It is one of the largest shipping companies in the world.
A cargo ship or freighter is a merchant ship that carries cargo, goods, and materials from one port to another. Thousands of cargo carriers ply the world's seas and oceans each year, handling the bulk of international trade. Cargo ships are usually specially designed for the task, often being equipped with cranes and other mechanisms to load and unload, and come in all sizes. Today, they are almost always built of welded steel, and with some exceptions generally have a life expectancy of 25 to 30 years before being scrapped.
![<span class="mw-page-title-main">K Line</span> Former Japanese shipping company, now [[Ocean Network Express]]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bf/K-stack.jpg)
Kawasaki Kisen Kaisha, Ltd. is a Japanese transportation company. It owns a fleet that includes dry cargo ships, container ships, liquefied natural gas carriers, Ro-Ro ships, tankers, and container terminals. It used to be the fourteenth largest container transportation and shipping company in the world, before becoming part of Ocean Network Express in 2017.
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Rail freight transport is the use of railways and trains to transport cargo as opposed to human passengers.
Bulk cargo is commodity cargo that is transported unpackaged in large quantities.
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A freight rate is a price at which a certain cargo is delivered from one point to another. The price depends on the form of the cargo, the mode of transport, the weight of the cargo, and the distance to the delivery destination. Many shipping services, especially air carriers, use dimensional weight for calculating the price, which takes into account both weight and volume of the cargo.
The lighter aboard ship (LASH) system refers to the practice of loading barges (lighters) aboard a bigger vessel for transport. It was developed in response to a need to transport lighters, a type of unpowered barge, between inland waterways separated by open seas. Lighters are typically towed or pushed around harbors, canals or rivers and cannot be relocated under their own power. The carrier ships are known variously as LASH carriers, barge carriers, kangaroo ships or lighter transport ships.
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In 1961 China established a state-run maritime shipping company and subsequently signed shipping agreements with many countries, laying the foundation for developing the country's ocean transport. That organization developed into the present-day China Ocean Shipping (Group) Company (COSCO). The Chinese government also invested heavily in water transport infrastructure, constructing new ports and rebuilding and enlarging older facilities.
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The United States Marine Highway Program is a United States Department of Transportation (DOT) initiative authorized to increase use of the United States' 29,000 mi (47,000 km) of navigable waterways to alleviate traffic and wear to the nation's highways caused by tractor trailer traffic. The program is managed by the Maritime Administration's Office of Ports & Waterways Planning.
