An empirical model for estimating berth and sailing times of mega container ships

We provide two empirical models for calculating the sailing time and berth time of maritime container liner networks to effectively model the ambiguity associated with sea and port contingency for ex-ante decisions of fleet deployment and route planning. The models are based on recorded AIS data of 110 mega vessels including all the operating container mega vessels with a capacity of 16,000 TEU or more during the summer of 2015. The models are able to estimate the sailing time (with R² of 0.974) and the berth time (with R² of 0.895) without knowledge of any operational-level explanatory variables. The models are validated against the published East Asia–North Europe services. Moreover, the study reveals that vessel operators adopt different berthing and sailing strategies even under the same conditions.