The complex network of global cargo ship movements

By Pablo Kaluza, Andrea Kölzsch, Michael T. Gastner, Bernd Blasius. Journal of the Royal Society Interface, 2010

952 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Transportation networks play a crucial role in human mobility, the exchange of goods and the spread of invasive species. With 90 per cent of world trade carried by sea, the global network of merchant ships provides one of the most important modes of transportation. Here, we use information about the itineraries of 16 363 cargo ships during the year 2007 to construct a network of links between ports. We show that the network has several features that set it apart from other transportation networks. In particular, most ships can be classified into three categories: bulk dry carriers, container ships and oil tankers. These three categories do not only differ in the ships' physical characteristics, but also in their mobility patterns and networks. Container ships follow regularly repeating paths whereas bulk dry carriers and oil tankers move less predictably between ports. The network of all ship movements possesses a heavy-tailed distribution for the connectivity of ports and for the loads transported on the links with systematic differences between ship types. The data analysed in this paper improve current assumptions based on gravity models of ship movements, an important step towards understanding patterns of global trade and bioinvasion.

Subfields: Ecology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/68d59a4d662cffe649bd228902e63f688d416d05

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In Ecology

1. S. Clusella‐Trullas
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8. M. A. Porter

Citations in the corpus

• Network diversity and maritime flows (2013, neutral): “Although network analysis has been applied to maritime flows already (Kaluza et al., 2010), the different vessel types remain analyzed separately while liner shipping received foremost attention (Wang and Wang, 2011; Ducruet and Notteboom, 2012).”
• Modern temporal network theory: a colloquium (2015, background): “[125] investigate the network of global ship transport.”
• Multilayer networks (2013, background): “Air transportation nets (3) Airports (308–3108) Airlines (15–530) [75,76,93] London underground Stations (314) Lines (14) [93,277] Global cargo ship network Ports (951) Ship types (3) [177]”
• Satellite Communications in the New Space Era: A Survey and Future Challenges (2020, background): “supplementary data sources for vessels and coastal authorities in busy port areas where conventional AIS receivers may not be able to cope with the large volume of ocean traffic [40].”
• Geoengineering impact of open ocean dissolution of olivine on atmospheric CO2, surface ocean pH and marine biology (2013, background): “The Lloyd’s Register Fairplay (Kaluza et al 2010) counted in year 2007 16 363 cargo ships and tankers with a total capacity of 665×106 gross tonnage (deadweight tonnage DWT).”
• Developing a deeper understanding of animal movements and spatial dynamics through novel application of network analyses (2012, background): “More recently, a desire to better understand how the internet or transport routes are connected has given rise to the exploration of spatial network structures (Gastner & Newman 2006; Kaluza et al. 2010), and in a few cases, biological spatial networks have tracked this progress.”
• Marine invasion genetics: from spatio-temporal patterns to evolutionary outcomes (2014, background): “Concerning the geographic particularities of the European region, the NE Atlantic Ocean shores include some of the most frequented shipping harbours worldwide (Kaluza et al. 2010; Keller et al. 2011).”
• Exploiting AIS Data for Intelligent Maritime Navigation: A Comprehensive Survey From Data to Methodology (2016, background): “The central role of maritime transportation in the world’s logistic system is evident in the statistical estimates from International Maritime Organization (IMO): around 90% of world trade is carried by sea and the trade volume are still growing at a rate even faster than global economy [1].”
• Link Prediction in Complex Networks: A Survey (2010, background): “Especially, it plays a very important role in analyzing transportation networks [150,151].”
• Range expansions across ecoregions: interactions of climate change, physiology and genetic diversity. (2014, background): “This suggests a scenario of continuous interchange of propagules due to exchange through shipping (Kaluza et al., 2010), which has a homogenizing effect on the genetic composition of introduced populations (e.g. Pineda et al., 2011).”
• Distributed impulsive synchronization of Lur'e dynamical networks via parameter variation methods (2018, methodology): “The exponential synchronization between the controlled Lur'e network (1) and the leader Lur'e network (2) is achieved if there exist constants T0 > 0, λ > 0 and M > 0 such that, for any initial condition of the networks ei(t) = ψi(t)(t ∈ [0, τ̄]), there holds”
• Mathematical Formulation of Multilayer Networks (2013, neutral): “works and so-called ‘‘networks of networks’’) [7,8,11–33].”