Bite-size Case Study

Data science: use of statistics in the shipping industry

Published on January 31, 2023 Originally recorded 2022   8 min
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0:04
The example of statistics in the shipping sector.
0:08
Passenger and freight ferries sail between ports and islands, and form a very important part of our infrastructure and trade systems. They use a lot of fuel.
0:19
The context of this research is that improving fuel consumption in shipping reduces costs, but also, more importantly, reduces emissions of greenhouse gases, and this is needed for conformance to new regulations. Ships produce what is called Big Data. Big Data is characterised by the three V's. It is data that pours in at a great Velocity, in great Volume and in a wide Variety of formats. Data scientists use the big data transmitted by sensors on the ships' engines with open source meteorological data to identify factors affecting fuel consumption, and a lot of research has been carried out on this. The research questions we're interested in is finding the gap in the current research and in addition to meteorological data, also looking at the effect of tide. Therefore, our research question is, does the tide affect fuel consumption when a ship passes through a channel? This is a particular issue in shipping going through islands where the ship is sailing in open water with heavy tides, that could affect the consumption of fuel. If the tide does affect the fuel consumption, is the effect great enough to justify timetable changes? Shipping management are interested to know whether they should change their practice to accommodate the effect of tide.
1:39
Here, the research method is as follows. We select a sample of ship journeys. We collect company data on the fuel consumption through the channel. We gather associated information including the load of the ship, the meteorological, that is the weather, and the tidal data. We use statistical methods to investigate the effects of all these factors on fuel consumption.
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Data science: use of statistics in the shipping industry

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