On Designing a Slot Sharing E-Platform for Liner Shipping Services

Abstract

Slot sharing phenomena are often observed in the liner shipping industry. When some liner shipping companies are providing container transportation service, they offer slots on board of their possessory vessels to their competitors in a cooperative manner. The liner shipping companies are amplifying their physical transport network coverage jointly and shortening service time accordingly. Such physical transport service is implemented nowadays after associated shippers book the service via online portals, i.e., E-platforms. The physical network and its related layout of the physical transport network has been changing dramatically during the past five years. The behavior of combining service links in the network and its related design of the E-platform could be interesting to practitioners as well as researchers. The booking business existing in the liner shipping alliances is similar to the booking system in the airline industry. However, the containers are not as selective as a human passenger when she/he is booking seats. Therefore, the potential design of the E-platform of the slot sharing business is different in its own way. By considering the similarities and differences, in this paper we propose some ideas regarding the design of the slot-sharing E-platform.