1. Real application situation of virtual arrival policy in shipping industry Yuquan Du Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Centre for Maritime Studies, National University of Singapore (NUS) duyuquan2006@gmail.com

2. Virtual Arrival Policy (VAP)  Also known as just-in-time arrival policy in the shipping industry, which is identified by the International Maritime Organization (IMO) as an energy- efficient operational measure  VAP: if a service delay at the discharge (next) port due to unavailability of berth and handling equipment is foreseen, the ship can reduce its sailing speed to save bunker fuel and avoid a long unproductive waiting time in port  Apart from bunker fuel savings and emissions mitigation, people in the shipping industry believe VAP could also relieve port congestion and thus improve the navigation safety of ships in port waters  After verifying that VAP could reduce fuel consumption by 27%, the oil tanker shipping industry first launched it in 2011, supported by the European Union  However, the pace of implementing VAP in shipping practice is slow

3. Bulk shipping: case study of two bulk carriers in the North and Baltic seas (Johnson and Styhre, 2015)  Data: voyage report (often called noon report by captains) data of two bulker carriers  The ships spent more than 40% of their time in ports and that half of the time in port was not productive  even a conservative estimate of one to four hours of reduced time per port call would lead to a reduction in energy use of 2–8% Hannes Johnson, Linda Styhre, 2015. Increased energy efficiency in short sea shipping through decreased time in port. Transportation Research Part A, 71: 167-178

4. Liner shipping: case study of a container ship over an Asia-Middle East service (My preliminary work at NUS)  Data: voyage report data of a 9000-TEU container ship representing one-year sailing  A manuscript was submitted and under review: Qiang Meng, Yuquan Du, Yadong Wang. Sprint-and-loiter sailing behavior: another barrier to ship energy efficiency in container liner shipping.  The results will be updated in a reply post to Prof. Robin Keller’s post in the open forum

5. Barriers to VAP (Johnson and Styhre, 2015)  Port closure (at nights and/or weekends) encourages ships to speed up to catch the business time windows  There is little time for working proactively and thoroughly analyzing bunker consumption for each trip to determine the most energy-efficient speed given a particular market condition and to follow up and give feedback to the crew on board  Ship fuel efficiency models, which accurately predict the fuel consumption of a ship at different speeds, with different displacement (draft) conditions, under different weather/sea conditions, are hard to develop  The balance between fuel savings due to slow steaming and cost increase in maintenance and crew wages is quite difficult in practice  Little flexibility to book pilots from the port authority  Lack of effective ship-shore-port communication  Perceived risk of arriving too late  …

6. Implementation issues of VAP  VAP is not necessarily adopted by every voyage of every ship. It can be initiated only when the bunker fuel savings and emission mitigation is significant  VAP will affect the commercial sides (charter/owner) of shipping in a very complicated way  Before launching a VA, one should decide whether it should be launched and what is the compensate rate for extra time.  When finishing a VA, bunker saving by taking into account speed reduction and weather/sea conditions should be calculated and might be further shared between two sides  Google “BIMCO virtual arrival clause” to find the commercial clauses designed by BIMCO for VAP

7. Thanks!