STOCA PROJECT

STOCA-Study of cargo flows in the Gulf of Finland in emergency situations

The Baltic Sea Region (BSR includes: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Norway, north-western Russia and northern Germany) is an area of high economic growth. The region attracts foreign direct investments and it offers challenging but positive economic prospects. The dominant mode of transport in the BSR is sea (about 76% of trade in BSR states), and other means of transport cover only 24%. In addition to their own import and export, Finnish and Estonian ports handle a major share of the Russian transit traffic. Finnish ports have mainly concentrated on container import to Russia, and Estonian ports carry a major share of the oil export from Russia. There are no studies available how the very large maritime volumes could be handled when the operational environment changes radically. Such changes would occur, for example, if a port or several ports or sea routes would be closed down due to an economic crisis or an environmental hazard.

The hypothesis of this project is that preparation for emergency situations can be started beforehand with the analysis of the present and future business environment by combining the information of cargo flows, actors, infrastructure, alternative routes, the co-operation between the ports and cargo flows through the alternative routes e.g., via roads and railroads through Estonia or South-eastern Finland. The cargo flows in the Gulf of Finland will be examined from two different perspectives. Firstly, the present operational environment will be examined and evaluated from the perspective of continuous and sustainable growth. Secondly, the future operational environment will be explored to reveal the potential discontinuities and their effects on the development of the cargo flows in the region. Finally, the alternative future development paths of the regional industry and transportation and their effects on local as well as national businesses will be analysed.

The results will reveal the optional strategic and operational actions for the business actors and the authorities. These actions will meet the future challenges of the changing business environment and requirements of the cargo industry in radical changes. For example, we analyse the capacity and potential for alternative routes in Finland and Estonia and estimate changes in traffic patterns, vessel sizes, railway tunnel between Helsinki and Tallinn and finally, offer suggestions for the actors.

With the help of this project's results, the actors, i.e. business actors and authorities both in Finland and Estonia, will be able to increase their readiness in extreme as well as in stable operative situations. In other words, they will be prepared to renew their strategies and operations to meet the future requirements. The goal of the research project is to analyse both environmentally and economically, and summarise the present and future business environment of cargo flows in the Gulf of Finland. The analysis provides the alternative development paths of the operational environment of the cargo flows from business and official perspectives within the framework of stable and emergency situations.

In Finlad the Stoca project covers the ports of Naantali, Turku, Hanko, Inkoo, Helsinki, Loviisa, Kotka, Hamina and Lappeenranta. In Estonia The Stoca project covers Paldiski, Muuga and Sillamäe.

Figure 1. Ports of the research environment.

WORK PACKAGES

Work Package 1 (LP)
Kotka Maritime Research Centre
The task of the Lead Partner (LP) is to implement the project coordination, increase project's publicity and visibility in all medias, e.g., arrange seminars and press conferences, update and launch www-pages, distribute brochures, publish press releases and spread knowledge of the project to the public and the highest governmental level in Finland and Estonia.

Work Package 2 (WP2)
Centre for Maritime Studies, University of Turku
WP2 produces basic data of current cargo flows, infrastructure and actors in the Gulf of Finland and importance of the cargo flows for business and society. In addition, future changes and cargo flow development are estimated. Based on these analyses, alternative routes for traffic flows in case of an emergency are studied.

Work Package 3 (WP3)
The Northern Dimension Research Centre (NORDI), Lappeenranta University of Technology
In WP3, alternative scenarios of operational environment in the extreme situations will be examined. Firstly, the analysis comprises of the possible emergency situations that could affect the Gulf of Finland cargo flows and the consequences of possible emergency situations for the actors in business and public sector. Secondly, the environmental effects of road and rail transportations on the alternative transport routes will be studied. In addition, the opportunities and threats for the operations of sea ports in the area of Baltic Sea Region and inland logistics centres in South-East Finland will be examined.

Work Package 4 (WP4)
Estonian Maritime Academy
WP4 includes determining the threats posed by crises for energy traffic flows in the Baltic Sea region and especially in the Gulf of Finland. The analysis will discuss oil and chemical flows and alternative routes, environmental, social, economical and political risks associated with oil transportation in emergency situations.

Work Package 5 (WP5)
Kouvola Research Unit, Lappeenranta University of Technology
WP5 will analyze different types of emergency situations occurring at the arbitrary periods of time (within defined investigation period) through computer based simulation models. Mostly system dynamics simulation is used for this purpose, but the utilization of more advanced methods are also emphasised during the implementation of the project, for example, agent based simulation. These initial and small-scale agent models enable the use of advanced artificial intelligence in the project, among complex command structures in the models; until today it has not been possible to conduct these with other approaches.

 STOCA-SIMULATION 

The objective of STOCA project is to analyse the functionality of the sea transportation system in the Gulf of Finland under different conditions. From logistical point of view Finland is like an island; around 85 percent of trade is transported by sea. Furthermore, Finnish ports handle a large part of the container transit to Russia, while Estonian ports handle a major share of the oil export from Russia. The functionality of the transport system using sea route is vital for the region, as 74 % of the Baltic Sea Region States' trade volume is transported by sea.

Transportation systems are a typical example of complex real-world systems, which cannot accurately be described by analytic methods. In the STOCA project the cargo flows in the Gulf of Finland will be examined from continuous growth perspective. This analysis reveals possible bottlenecks of the system. Also alternative future development paths of the regional industry and transportation will be used as scenarios.

The analyses will be used to evaluate strategic and operational actions of business actors and the authorities. For example, the project analyzes vessel sizes and possible alternative routes in Finland and Estonia and estimates changes in traffic patterns. Furthermore, the profitability of railway tunnel between Helsinki and Tallinn is researched.    

WP5 will analyze different types of emergency situations occurring at the arbitrary periods of time (within defined investigation period) through computer based simulation models. Mostly system dynamics simulation is used for this purpose, but the utilization of more advanced methods are also emphasized during the implementation of the project, for example, agent based simulation. These initial and small-scale agent models enable the use of advanced artificial intelligence in the project, among complex command structures in the models; until today it has not been possible to conduct these with other approaches.

In ABMS individual agents make their own decisions and  complexity emerges from the interaction between different agents (Bonabeau 2002). The agents might only posses a couple of different rules but it is not possible to know what the final interaction inside the whole system will be. Thus, only a couple of different rules can induce extremely complex behavior (Reynolds (1987) has shown how it is possible to simulate a flock of birds using only three different rules: separation, alignment, and cohesion).

 As ABMS is still a relatively new field of modeling. Henesey (2006) studied how to simulate a container terminal system with multi agent system. Container terminal systems are a major part of seaports and as such the work can be seen to partially simulate a seaport. Govindan et al. (2006) used a geographic information system in conjunction with ABMS principles and studied how to model the security of a seaport. However, they do not study the actual throughput in the seaport. Overall there seems to be almost no studies regarding simulations on seaports using ABMS. However, as ABMS is an extremely flexible modeling method there are no reasons why it could not be used to simulate individual seaports.

Simulating a Finnish seaport

The project utilizes two types of simulation models: SD and ABMS. The seaport simulated is Kotka, one of the largest seaports in Finland. Kotka has been chosen due to its large size and importance in container traffic in Finland. As this study is focused only on general goods cargo, the simulation models will only contain this module. Also, all general goods cargo traffic will be treated as containers, as containerization will most likely increase heavily in the future. In order to make a usable simulation model, the seaport needs to invest in new capacity in order to cope with the increased demand. It would be possible to simplify the model and assume the seaports to invest at the same rate as their demand increases. However, in reality the investments take a long time (might even take years) so in this simulation model the investments come also with a delay. As soon as the utilization is higher than a threshold value, the seaport will invest into additional capacity, which will be added to the capacity after one year. The structure in the simulation model is presented in Figure 3.

Figure 3. Simulation moded of new build capacity of warehouses in Hamina, Kotka and Kouvola  

An agent-based model of Kotka seaport

As the basic unit in agent-based modeling is an agent, it offers more degrees of freedom regarding the actual simulation model. In this study, there are going to be two kinds of agents: sea vessels and cranes. Each vessel will arrive at the seaport and go into a queue in order to be processed.

ABMS is a much more versatile approach to simulate seaports and the simulation model does not need to be based on assumptions about different distributions in the simulation model. SD, on the other hand, needs to be used in conjunction with some other methods as well in order to study the service levels of the seaports (this study was combined with queuing theory). This would indicate that ABMS is a very suitable method in simulating seaports. The only drawback in using ABMS is a big increase in the actual simulation time. This is not a major issue when running one simulation run but running thousands of runs (such as Monte Carlo – simulation and / or sensitivity analyses) requires a large amount of time. This also makes the potential parameterization of the simulation model difficult. ABMS is a strong candidate for the further studies of cargo flows in the Gulf of Finland. It can easily incorporate different kinds of seaports both in Finland and Estonia.

As the purpose in the larger project is to study emergency situations, ABMS is able to study more complex events (Schieritz and Grössler 2003) while SD might have difficulties in some situations. It should though be noted, that SD is still able to study many different kinds of emergency situations but it is not as versatile as ABMS is. As seaports have not been studied earlier using ABMS, it is not possible to compare the created model with any earlier studies. However, it seems that ABMS is very well suited to studying seaports. There has been some earlier works regarding SD simulations about seaports and this simulation model was relatively simple compared to the others (such as Munitic et al. 2003). As such, it is a lot easier to simulate different seaports in Finland and Estonia with the solution proposed in this research.

All the used references are listed in Microsoft Word document below:

 STOCA project references.doc