Ship Behavior in Ports and Waterways: An Empirical Perspective

As one of the most important freight transportation modes, maritime transport has been the backbone of international trade and global economy. From the cargo flow point of view, seaports and inland shipping link the individual countries and the global waterborne transportation networks. To analyze the current ship traffic and port performance or predict future scenarios, understanding ship behavior in ports and waterways is necessary. However, the depicted sailing environment is in the current studies far simpler than the real-life ports and waterways. To this end, we formulate the following research objective:
to gain empirical knowledge of ship behavior in real-life sailing environments and to empirically investigate the influencing mechanisms of intrinsic and external factors.