Special Issue of Journal of Navigation: Smart and Synchronized inland-water transportation and ocean shipping

Key dates

Submission of revised and extended manuscripts	Notification to authors	Final revised versions due
28th of February, 2023	31st of May 2023	31st of July 2023

Submission details

Papers should be submitted to the online peer review system here. When prompted, please select this special issue when you are submitting your work.

Research Interest and Fitness of Special Issue

The above developments in ship and shipping industry will require high level of autonomy and synchromodality enabled by advanced ICT technologies, which will reshape the transportation industry. Addressing the scientific and technological knowledge needed in this development is relevant for Journal of Navigation, especially in the following aspects:

• Ship autonomy and human-machine interaction
• Ship design and safety
• River channel updating and the impacts
• Green intelligent ship
• Efficient and accurate positioning service
• Reliable shore-based support services
• Inland-water system technological design
• Digital ecological facilities
• Economic implication of emerging river shipping technologies
• Multimodal logistics synchronization
• Inland-water and ocean intermodal network
• Fleet planning and dispatching management
• Alliance of seaports and inland river ports

Academic Experience and Reputation of the Guest Editors

Four Guest Editors cover the areas of intermodal transportation, global supply chain, river and ocean shipping, and port logistics. They not only have rich experience in serving in editorial board of scientific journals and in being guest of journal special issues, but also have great publication records in Transportation Research Part E, Maritime Policy and Management, Transport Policy, Maritime Economy and Logistics, Journal of Transport Geography, and Ocean and Coastal Management, and also have long history of serving as editors and reviewers in these journals.

• Zhongzhen YANG, Professor, Ningbo University, China, yangzhongzhen@nbu.edu.cn
• Margareta Lützhöft, Professor, Western Norway University of Applied Sciences, Norway, Margareta.Holtensdotter.Lutzhoft@hvl.no
• Gang CHEN, Associate Professor, World Maritime University, Sweden, gc@wmu.se
• Jinxian WENG, Professor, Shanghai Maritime University, China, jxweng@shmtu.edu.cn

Background of the topic:

In the last 20 years, the fast ICT development and their applications have been powering the inland-water transportation sector to be more efficient and sustainable, especially through automation and digitalization of operational processes at the company level. While this potential is still being explored by individual firms, we can already see its further development at the network level, which will offer great service visibility and flexibility based on broad digital integration between firms. This technological development will reshape the transportation industry in different aspects toward the future, as described in the concepts like Synchromodality and Physical Internet. Indeed, individual transportation modes incl. inland-water cannot be managed separately from each other anymore, but need an integrated and synchronized approach. 

In many countries and regions, modal shift has been encouraged by various measures for green freight logistics. For example, in 2001 the European Commission started to promote shifting from faster, more polluting modes such as road and air transport to slower and less polluting modes such as rail or maritime transport. Norway is at the forefront of this development with the Yara Birkeland replacing 40,000 truckloads of fertilizer per year, the two ASKO grocery shuttles over the Oslo fjord reducing road travel by two million kilometers annually and the electric car ferries of Bastø Fosen reducing CO2 emissions by 75%. In northern China, the coal transportation from coal mines to ports was shifted from road to rail in 2018; in addition, inland water shipping was also developed with the aim to increase its share of container transportation to gateway ports especially in southern China. For its new-generation of inland water shipping system, China has speeded up the construction of high-grade inland waterways and green-smart ports, and built low-carbon and efficient ships. At present, China is optimizing its transportation structure by encouraging and supporting the river-sea intermodal transportation, and accelerating the construction of a green, low-carbon and smart inland water transportation system. In this process, high-tech and intelligent ships is the core element of “ship-port-cargo” system in its “human-machine-environment”. 

In this context, inland waterway and lock upgrading, inland-waterway technological design, ship autonomy, ship and shipping safety, river port terminal location and design; multimodal logistics synchronization become hot research topics in the field of ship navigation and shipping transportation. The aim of this Special Issue is to collect and present high-quality papers concerning these topics. The manuscript is not limited to operational level but also can be extended to tactical and strategic levels. The beneficiaries of this Special Issue include academic researchers, shipping companies, railway companies, terminal operators, and policy-makers.