Exploratory analysis for forecasting ship operating costs

The purpose of this paper is to present an exploratory analysis of oil tankers for a ship management company with a view to identifying methods of forecasting the operating cost of a ship. Within the shipping industry we have several thousand years of history but there still exists a need to improve shipping productivity realized through third party ship management. The purpose of this study is to explore a ship management company's current methodology for estimating ship operating costs, by focusing primarily on the exploratory data analysis and identifying potential methods to develop new forecasting methodologies. The study looks at data of fourteen VLCCs taken from a historical budget database for a ship management company. The data was examined and revealed four distinct categories of cost elements among nine cost elements identified as drivers of the total operating costs of these tankers. Third party shipping companies need a forecasting model that is analytical in content and focuses on the broader picture of factors driving the operating costs. This study will take a step to fill this gap by explaining the difficulty in getting, cleaning and preparing the extracted data for analysis. The cleaned data is framed by a frame matrix and analysed with simple statistics such as the average, correlation and t test. Informed by this preliminary analysed data, advanced methods are suggested to develop new forecasting methodologies.The purpose of this paper is to present an exploratory analysis of oil tankers for a ship management company with a view to identifying methods of forecasting the operating cost of a ship. Within the shipping industry we have several thousand years of history but there still exists a need to improve shipping productivity realized through third party ship management. The purpose of this study is to explore a ship management company's current methodology for estimating ship operating costs, by focusing primarily on the exploratory data analysis and identifying potential methods to develop new forecasting methodologies. The study looks at data of fourteen VLCCs taken from a historical budget database for a ship management company. The data was examined and revealed four distinct categories of cost elements among nine cost elements identified as drivers of the total operating costs of these tankers. Third party shipping companies need a forecasting model that is analytical in content and focuses on the broader picture of factors driving the operating costs. This study will take a step to fill this gap by explaining the difficulty in getting, cleaning and preparing the extracted data for analysis. The cleaned data is framed by a frame matrix and analysed with simple statistics such as the average, correlation and t test. Informed by this preliminary analysed data, advanced methods are suggested to develop new forecasting methodologies