The impacts of pilotage planning on green maritime logistics

Abstract

Pilotage is mandatory in international maritime logistics for the considerations of national sovereignty and navigational safety. This paper studied a green pilotage planning problem that includes deployment and route planning of pilot boats with the constraints on the time windows of the pilot pickup and delivery tasks, the number of pilots, and the capacity of pilot boats. We developed a mixed integer linear programming model that aims to maximize the overall benefit of the pilot station. In contrast to existing studies, we analyzed the optimal planning of pilot boats with the cost and environmental considerations that uncovered the impacts of green pilotage planning on carbon emissions. Three types of green policies and their impacts have been discussed in this study. We also explored how the trade-off between the operational cost and revenue from the green efforts influences the decision making of the network planner. One surprising finding has been obtained that the overall green efficiency could be improved when the network can receive extra benefit from more voyage and utilization of pilot boats. We conducted a case study of Zhoushan, China to verify the theoretical analysis. Moreover, we compared three different green subsidy policies on carbon emissions, pilotage vessel operation costs, and pilotage vessel investments. The more efficient green policy and its corresponding conditions are discussed.