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Conference paper2016Peer reviewed

Time of arrival variations for short-sea shipping of roundwood and chips within the Baltic Sea

Fjeld, Dag; Talbot, Bruce

Abstract

Supply structures for Nordic forest industries often include import volumes which can be critical for during certain seasons. Around the Baltic Sea, these volumes are delivered with small bulk vessels (under 10 000 DWT). Even though the cargo sizes for roundwood shipments are small in relation to other bulk products, reliable deliveries are important for an efficient supply system.This paper presents a recent example of cargo-level variation in voyage and arrival times for selected roundwood and chip flows in the Baltic Sea area. These simple statistics can be useful for stock-and contingency planning when securing wood supply from multiple sources. Data was made available from the Vesselplan system for a subset of import flows to Sweden for ports of lading in Russia, Estonia, and Latvia to ports of discharge in the south, southeast and north of Sweden.Vessel/cargo size varied from just under 2000 to over 6000 metric tons. The average voyage times between port combinations varied between 26 and 66 hours, and varied considerably within each combination. 85% of the cargoes arrived within 5 hours of the latest estimated time of arrival. The results showed a typical right-skewed distribution with a higher frequency of late arrivals than early arrivals. The smallest deviations were seen for south Sweden where cargoes came predominantly from Latvia. The longest delays were noted for southeast and northeast Sweden where a higher proportion of cargoes came from Estonia and Russia.

Keywords

wood supply sourcing; shipping; reliability

Published in

Title: From Theory to Practice: Challenges for Forest Engineering : 49th Symposium on Forest Mechanization Warsaw, Poland 2016
eISBN: 978-83-943889-9-7
Publisher: Warsaw University of Life Sciences

Conference

49th International Symposium on Forestry Mechanization (FORMEC), SEP 04-07, 2016, Warsaw, POLAND