Improving baltic sea services : a quantitative planning approach

Reduction of inventories and optimum delivery of input goods are important parameters for efficient production processes. Therefore transport processes are a vital part of industrial production, and their features are important determining factors for production planning. Especially in the Baltic Sea region, short sea roro shipping connections are an important part of transport chains but also constitute a bottleneck through their restricted schedules. The attractivity of a short-sea roro shipping connection is determined through several factors. Among these are shipping prices, transport time, frequency but also factors that cannot be influenced by the ships operator, such as obligatory driver breaks for truck drivers, which use the shipping service, the geographical position of ports and the geographical position of logistics hotspots which determine the main-transport flows. A roro shipping service that is part of an optimal connection between two logistics hotspots would have a clear advantage on the market. The paper shall present a model that allows for the analysis of complete intermodal RoRo-shipping chains in regard to their attractivity for their end-customers. The model cumulates different features of a transport chain into one indicator. Thereby allowing the optimization of RoRo shipping connection towards customer needs.