The Port of Antwerp is the port of the City of Antwerp. It is located in Flanders (Belgium), mainly in the province of Antwerp but also partially in the province of East Flanders. It is a seaport in the heart of Europe accessible to capesize ships. It is Europe’s second-largest seaport, after Rotterdam. Antwerp stands at the upper end of the tidal estuary of the Scheldt. The estuary is navigable by ships of more than 100,000 Gross Tons as far as 80 km inland. Like the Port of Hamburg, the Port of Antwerp's inland location provides a more central location in Europe than the majority of North Sea ports. Antwerp's docks are connected to the hinterland by rail, road, and river and canal waterways. As a result, the port of Antwerp has become one of Europe's largest seaports, ranking second behind Rotterdam by total freight shipped. Its international rankings vary from 11th to 20th (AAPA).In 2012, the Port of Antwerp handled 14,220 sea trade ships (190.8 million tons of cargo, 53.6% in containers), 57,044 inland barges (123.2 million tons of cargo), and offered liner services to 800 different maritime destinations.
Liner shipping and container ports have repeatedly made headline news since 2020 as companies across supply chains were hit with price hikes and shipment delays. Predictability became a thing of the past. This report assesses these disruptions to containerised maritime transport and analyses their causes and impacts.
In 2019, the International Maritime Organization (IMO) made it mandatory to support the electronic clearance of ships entering foreign ports. In preparation, the IMO Facilitation Committee started to develop a reference data model to harmonise the most important standards for ship clearance. The first version was published in 2020. The model is already extending into other areas of ship-port data exchanges and it is now increasingly seen as a tool to coordinate development of new electronic data exchange standards for ship operations. The lack of such coordination has, up until now, been a significant problem—much better coordination is essential in the relatively small and highly international market that shipping represents.
In this article, the authors describe and illustrate what they call a "network of networks" perspective and map the development of a lead network for the Antwerp Port Authority that governed organizations and networks in the port community before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. They find that setting a collective focus and selective integration are crucial in the creation and reproduction of an effective system to adequately deal with a wicked problem like the COVID-19 pandemic. The findings on crisis management and network governance are used to engage practitioners and public policy planners to revisit the current design and governance of organizational networks within organizational fields that have been hit by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Pavement design is essentially and usually a structural long-term evaluation process which is needed to ensure that traffic loads are efficiently distributed at all levels of the total road structure. Furthermore, to get a complete analysis of its durability behavior, long-term monitoring should be facilitated, not only from the top by falling weight deflectometer (FWD) or core drilling but preferably from inside the structure and at exactly the same positions during a long-time interval. Considering that it is very hard to devise an efficient method to determine realistic in-situ mechanical properties of pavements, the determination of strain at the bottom of asphalt pavement layers through non-destructive tests is of a great interest. As it is known, fiber Bragg grating (FBG) sensors are the most promising candidates to effectively replace conventional strain gauges for a long-term monitoring application in a harsh environment. The main goals of this paper are to compile an overview of the recent developments worldwide in the application of fiber optics sensors (FOS) in asphalt pavement monitoring systems; to find out if those systems provide repeatable and suitable results for a long-term monitoring; if there are certain solutions to validate an inverse modelling approach based on the results of FWD and FOS.
PurposeEconomies of scale drive container ship owners towards ordering larger vessels. Terminals need to ensure a safe (un)loading operation of these vessels, which can only be guaranteed if the mooring equipment is not overloaded (lines, fenders and bollards) and if the motions of the vessel remain below set limits, under external forces. This paper aims to focus on the passing vessel effect as a potential disturbing factor in the Port of Antwerp.Design/methodology/approachMotion criteria for allowing safe (un)loading of container vessels are established by considering the container handling process and existing international standards (PIANC). A case study simulation is presented where the behaviour of the moored vessel under ship passages is evaluated. Starting from a representative event, the effect of changes in passing speed and distance is discussed.FindingsThe study illustrates the influence of passing velocity and distance on the behaviour of the moored vessel, showing that when passing speeds are higher and/or distances lower than the reference event, safety limits are potentially exceeded. Possible mitigating measures, including the use of stiffer mooring lines and/or a change in arrangement, are discussed.Research limitations/implicationsThis paper serves as a basis for future research on safety criteria and optimisation of the mooring equipment and configuration to deal with passing vessel effects.Practical implicationsThe presented results can be used by ship and terminal designers to gain familiarity with passing vessel effects and adopt suggested best practice.Social implicationsBy restricting the motions of the passing vessels, the focus and general well-being of the crane operator is enhanced, as is the safety of workers.Originality/valueThe paper provides a unique combination of container fleet observation, safety criteria establishment and case study application.
