The Impact of the Crude Oil Price on Tankers’ Port-Call Features: Mining the Information in Automatic Identification System

Abstract

Ship navigation technical data contains a lot of information. In this paper, we explore a relationship between the crude oil price and tankers’ port-call features by mining the information recorded in Automatic Identification System (AIS), which extends the application field of ship navigation technical data and aims to help oil shipping enterprises and port enterprises to arrange operation plans in advance. We generate a monthly panel data over the period from 2010 to 2020 of major global ports located in main crude oil exporting countries from AIS data. By using the panel fixed-effect model and binary logit model, our empirical results innovatively present the tanker’s monthly port-call features are influenced by crude oil price fluctuation through four dimensions, that is the tankers’ port-call numbers, the average docking time, total gross tonnage of the docking tankers and the number of different docking tankers. With these variables, we attempt to analyze the relationship between crude oil price fluctuation on tankers’ port-call features. The results of the study are helpful to comprehensively understand the impact mechanism of the crude oil price on the tankers’ port-call features.