Decision making in Roll-on/Roll-off operations

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Roll-on/Roll-off (RoRo) operations describe all processes related to the maritime transportation of vehicles with RoRo ships and the maritime transshipment of vehicles in RoRo terminals. To address increasing operational costs and throughputs, the field of Operations Research can provide opportunities to support efficient and effective RoRo operations. Maritime transportation and transshipment are an important part of the vehicle distribution in automotive supply chains and the strategic, tactical, and operational levels of decision making in RoRo operations. We provide an overview of both processes to understand the dependence of RoRo operations on automotive supply chains. We further classify publications into sea side and land side RoRo operations, focusing on the design of RoRo networks, the size, mix and deployment of RoRo fleets, the stowage of RoRo ships and the performance, berths, personnel and storage of RoRo terminals. We summarize their essential messages, models, and algorithms and assign them to the levels of decision making. Finally, we identify future trends that will lead to autonomous and sustainable RoRo operations. On the one hand, RoRo operations are less suitable for autonomous control and guidance than container dealing Lift-on/Lift-off (LoLo) operations, but recently there have been promising approaches regarding autonomous controlled processes and autonomous guided vehicles within RoRo terminals. On the other hand, measures for green RoRo terminals and trade imbalances as well as multimodality in the context of the New Silk Road offer potential for further research.