The impact of slow ocean steaming on delivery reliability and fuel consumption

With a dominant volume of global transportation being conducted by sea, ocean container transport greatly impacts the global economy. Since sea vessels are drastically more fuel efficient when traveling at lower speeds, slow steaming has become a widely adopted practice to reduce bunker costs. However, this leads to a longer transportation time, which together with the unpredictability of the delay has been a big challenge. We propose a model to quantify the relationship among shipping time, bunker cost and delivery reliability. Our findings lead to a simple and implementable policy with a controlled cost and guaranteed delivery reliability.