These were the years when, both in business and university,
we were departing from a ‘modal’ perception of the ‘maritime domain’, and from
such things as port management, shipping finance, or naval architecture,
looking instead towards the ‘big picture’ of door-to-door transport and global
logistics. The carriers themselves were beginning to realize that, due to cut-throat
competition, there was little money to be made from port-to-port transport, and
that survival meant designing their offering around the door-to-door concept.
Carriers were thus transforming themselves into integrated logistics providers,
in an effort to capture value from aviation, overland transport, warehousing,
distribution and the door-to-door supply chain. Their affiliates, such as
Maersk Logistics, Cosco Logistics, APL Logistics, CMA CGM Logistics and NYK
Logistics could be seen everywhere. During
my NOL/APL years in Singapore, I remember advising on everything from the
production of a silk shirt in Hanoi, Vietnam to its placement on the right shelve
of an exclusive boutique on Fifth Avenue, New York. Maritime Logistics was
emerging (photo).
(photo source: Haralambides 2026, forthcoming)
With my good colleagues @Dragan Čišić and @Saša Drezgić
of the University of Rijeka, in ‘Dreamland Croatia’, we wondered what had
actually happened since then on the research front, what has been the impact of
those works on business and society, and where we are heading next (our next
work on the impact of artificial intelligence on maritime logistics is to appear
soon).
The results were truly astounding. A total of ten thousand
papers were retrieved from the Scopus, Web of Science, IEEE, and OpenAlex databases
and encoded using Large Language Model (LLM) embeddings.
Among many others, impactful areas of prolific output were
ship-routing and arrival prediction; terminal efficiency benchmarking;
short-sea-shipping and intermodal networks; ESG and environmental performance; network
connectivity; maritime chokepoints, cushioning external shocks, and
dual-purpose ships and port infrastructures.
And what about the future? New research avenues are opening
up, most of which based on artificial intelligence applications in shipping and
ports. They include digital integration; green and smart shipping and ports;
autonomous shipping; dealing with the effects of climate change, blue
corridors, nuclear propulsion; zero-carbon fuels, cyber-risk, blockchain
applications, big data and predictive analytics, robotic engineering, and transition
management and governance.
Nowaday’s, doing things better is everyone’s struggle; but
doing a lot of things ‘together’ better is what we have called maritime
logistics. HH
(link: https://authors.elsevier.com/sd/article/S2092-5212(26)00023-4)
