Model development for east Asian container shipping considering multifarious use of vessels and ports

Container shipping in the eastern Asian region has been rapidly increasing. Enlargement of the size of vessels seeking economies of scale encouraged the concentrated use of large ports, and raised the volume of hierarchical movement of freight, namely hubs and spokes operation with efficient transshipment. We propose an integrated network model which can reproduce and estimate the volume of flows and the transport patterns under various policy impacts such as the improvement of port facilities. and port operation, And we discuss the characteristics of Asian ports based on the outputs of the model, Finally an impact study of port improvement initiatives is introduced as an example of model-application.