APPLICATION OF FORECASTING IN SHIPPING INDUSTRY

The Product life cycle for a commercial ship is often more than 30 years. The lead-time in designing and manufacturing a ship is often a few years. By the time the ship is built and put into operation, the situation in the market could be very different than when the decision was made to build the ship. Shipping is a capital intensive business and a good knowledge of ship life cycle and its management is crucial in avoiding losses or making gains. These gains and losses could be substantial. Shipping is often a huge investment which needs to be safeguarded against future trends of supply and demand. To this end, forecasting techniques could help in looking into future and aiding the decision making process. The research presented in this paper is an attempt to forecast trends in shipping for 11 types of ship design in the last few decades by using conventional and neural networks. In this paper only the results for the bulkers will be presented. The results show that neural networks offer the best results and that it is possible to use information available in the market to complement and improve the reliability of neural network predictions