It is our pleasure to let you know that the Laboratory for Maritime Transport haswon the "Piraeus International Centre Award" for 2008 at this year’s Lloyd’s List Greek Shipping Awards. The award was received by Professor Harilaos N. Psaraftis. It is now five years since these prestigious awards were launched and the fifth anniversary of one of the maritime calendar’s most exciting events was celebrated on Friday December 12, 2008 at the Athenaeum Intercontinental Hotel in Athens. Over 1,000 key personalities attended the annual presentation dinner that paid tribute to the world’s largest shipowning community, their service partners and some of the industry’s outstanding achievements during the preceding year. This year's proceedings were officially opened by Greece’s Deputy Minister of Merchant Marine, the Aegean and Island Policy, Panos Kammenos. The "Piraeus International Centre Award" is for Greek or non-Greek companies or other entities that have demonstrated outstanding service to Greek shipping clients or members, and/or have made an outstanding contribution to the development of Greece as a shipping business and service center.    Click here to download newsflash.

As far as LMT involvement in IMO business is concerned, MEPC 58 saw continued progress on the topic of Environmental Risk Evaluation Criteria in Formal Safety Assessment. Chaired by Prof. Psaraftis, a group attended by delegations from Canada, China, Finland, Greece, Japan, Malaysia, New Zealand, Norway, Turkey, and the United States, and by observers from BIMCO, OCIMF and Intertanko discussed all pending issues as regards the establishment of environmental cost-effectiveness criteria in FSA. Such issues were under discussion within a correspondence group established since MEPC 56 (summer 2007). It was noted that even though divergence of opinion existed among group members on some key issues, there were also areas where agreement could be reached. And indeed, the group agreed that non-linearity between cleanup costs and oil spill volume had been documented in various studies. The group also agreed that, in spite of various documented shortcomings, in Steps 3 and 4 of the FSA one could use an “oil spill cost per unit volume” criterion to assess the cost-effectiveness of RCOs. Significant debate took place as regards the value of the cost-effectiveness threshold. The group’s deliberations were presented by Prof. Psaraftis in plenary and it was agreed to extend this discussion by re-establishing a correspondence group under his coordination, with a view to finalizing the discussion by MEPC 59, to be held in July of 2009. More details will be presented in the next LMT newsletter.

EU FP6 Project MOSES (Motorways of the Sea European Style) held two back-to-back meetings in September. One on Sep. 22 in Brussels, to review progress on the project with the European Commission and external reviewers, and one hosted by NTUA-LMT on Sep. 29-30 in Athens, to discuss technical and managerial matters. The MOSES consortium is coordinated by MARINTEK (Norway), has 41 partners from 17 European countries and a total budget of 14 Million Euros.

For more information on MOSES, please visit this link: www.moses-eu-project.org

The 2nd International Symposium on Ship Operations, Management, and  Economics was held on 17-18 September 2008 in Athens, Greece, organised by the Greek Section of the Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers (SNAME) and hosted at the premises of Eugenides Foundation. The keynote speech of the symposium, which was attended by some 120 people, was given by the SNAME President, Admiral Robert E. Kramek (USCG, ret.).

LMT had a strong participation with the presentation of 4 papers, under the titles “Early Commitment and Entry Deterrence in an LNG shipping market”, “Marine Environment Risk Assessment: A Survey on the Disutility Cost of Oil Spills”, “Exploring tanker market elasticity with respect to oil production using FORESIM”, and “A model-based approach for tactical decision making in oil spill response” (the last one with Oxford University). In total, 28 papers were presented in a two-day programme.
LMT’s Prof. Harilaos Psaraftis was present as the outgoing chairman of the Greek Section of SNAME, succeeded by Dr. George Anagnostou. Also, LMT’s Assist. Prof. Dimitrios Lyridis was the chairman of the Papers / Technical committee.

2008 Shipping Industry Forum, Grande Bretagne Hotel, Athens, Greece
LMT organised on 28 May 2008 an event on the "Status and Outlook of the Greek Shipbuilding Industry". The event was hosted at the Piraeus Marine Club, in the frame of the Project PLOIGOS, which is funded by the European Community Initiative EQUAL.
The event was saluted by D. Kontos, from the Ministry of Employment, Professor K. Moutzouris, rector of NTUA, and E. Stavropoulos, from the Ministry of Development, and was coordinated by Ass. Professor D. Lyridis of LMT, who gave an introduction to the current problems of the Greek shipbuilding industry.
The event’s speakers were I. Stefanou (Managing Director of the Shipbuilding & Industrial Enterprises of Syros and advisor to the board of the Shipbuilding & Industrial Enterprises of Elefsis, among other), G. Gratsos (President of the Hellenic Chamber of Shipping), N. Varvates (President of the Union of Greek Shipowners in Short-Shipping), K. Kokkalas (Vice President of Neorion S.A. Holdings, Managing Director of the Shipbuilding & Industrial Enterprises of Elefsis and National Representative at the Community of European Shipyards’ Associations - CESA), I. Kokkarakis, from Bureau Veritas, C. Frangopoulos (President of the School of Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering of NTUA), and H. Psaraftis, Head of LMT, who recapped the discussion. A fruitful discussion followed with the active participation of the audience. Overall, the weak points of the Greek shipbuilding industry were identified, in relation to external factors of the world economy, and interesting proposals were made for overcoming them.

German Operations Research Society conference
Prof. Psaraftis presented a paper entitled “Logistics - emissions tradeoffs in maritime transport” at the Operations Research 2008 international conference organized by the German Operations Research Society and held at the campus of the University of Augsburg, Germany on September 3-5, 2008.
The conference had “OR and Global Business” as its theme and was attended by some 500 delegates, who enjoyed an excellent Bavarian hospitality and a conference of a wide range of topics in OR. The topic of Prof. Psaraftis’ paper is indeed a global issue, as reduction of emissions in maritime transport, both from greenhouse gases (GHG), such as CO2, CH4 and others, and also from SO2 and NOx emissions, as well as others, is a goal that is clearly stated and very pressing. The paper focused on logistics-related tradeoffs that are at stake in the goal for greener shipping and presented models that can be used to evaluate these tradeoffs.
More details about the conference can be found at www.or2008.de

2008 Shipping Industry Forum, Grande Bretagne Hotel, Athens, Greece
LMT organised on 28 May 2008 an event on the "Status and Outlook of the Greek Shipbuilding Industry". The event was hosted at the Piraeus Marine Club, in the frame of the Project PLOIGOS, which is funded by the European Community Initiative EQUAL.
The event was saluted by D. Kontos, from the Ministry of Employment, Professor K. Moutzouris, rector of NTUA, and E. Stavropoulos, from the Ministry of Development, and was coordinated by Ass. Professor D. Lyridis of LMT, who gave an introduction to the current problems of the Greek shipbuilding industry.
The event’s speakers were I. Stefanou (Managing Director of the Shipbuilding & Industrial Enterprises of Syros and advisor to the board of the Shipbuilding & Industrial Enterprises of Elefsis, among other), G. Gratsos (President of the Hellenic Chamber of Shipping), N. Varvates (President of the Union of Greek Shipowners in Short-Shipping), K. Kokkalas (Vice President of Neorion S.A. Holdings, Managing Director of the Shipbuilding & Industrial Enterprises of Elefsis and National Representative at the Community of European Shipyards’ Associations - CESA), I. Kokkarakis, from Bureau Veritas, C. Frangopoulos (President of the School of Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering of NTUA), and H. Psaraftis, Head of LMT, who recapped the discussion. A fruitful discussion followed with the active participation of the audience. Overall, the weak points of the Greek shipbuilding industry were identified, in relation to external factors of the world economy, and interesting proposals were made for overcoming them.

WMU hosts SAR Workshop in Malmö (2nd Workshop for the Reference Group of the WMU Project on SAR Research related to Passenger Ships, Malmo, Sweden, May 27-28 )
LMT was invited to participate in the 2nd Workshop for the Reference Group of the WMU Project on SAR Research related to Passenger Ships that was organized by the World Maritime University in Malmö, Sweden on May 27th and 28th, 2008. In this outline LMT lecturer Dr. Nikos P. Ventikos gave a presentation that focused on SAR in Greece. More specifically, the speech covered elements of practice and research in order to draft an accurate picture of the current status of SAR in Greece and of its perspectives.

Report on Environmental Risk Evaluation Criteria
Under the coordination of Prof. Psaraftis, work on Environmental Risk Evaluation Criteria continued in the period after the 57th session of the IMO’s Marine Environment Protection Committee (MEPC), held March 31 - April 4 in London. MEPC 57 deciced to extend the mandate of the correspondence group until MEPC 58 (October 2008, London). In the context of this work, Prof. Psaraftis proposed a general framework for incorporating environmental risk evaluation criteria within IMO’s guidelines for Formal Safety Assessment (FSA). Such criteria are currently absent from FSA. Said criteria are relevant for evaluating on a cost-benefit basis Risk Control Options (RCOs) for reducing oil spill pollution risk. Oil pollution may come from any ship, including bunker spills from non-tank vessels. RCOs are not necessarily ship-based, and may include vessel traffic management information systems (VTMIS) and other options. The approach can also combine environmental criteria with safety criteria already in use in FSA and can be extended to criteria other than pollution. Also relevant for this work and highly worthy of note is a study by Japan on the cost of oil spills, showing a non-linear function of spill cost versus spill volume. Discussion on this challenging subject will continue at MEPC 58.

The fifth technical meeting of the SNAME Greek Section was held on March 20th, 2008, at the premises of Kristen Navigation, with about 30 people attending the lecture. Dr. Panayotis Zacharioudakis, Post-Doctoral Associate of LMT, made a presentation entitled “Development of Decision Support Tools in Shipping”. Dr. Zacharioudakis first presented the background on the subject of modeling the shipping system. The parameters affecting the shipping markets and the freight levels were analysed and a generic overview of the process of simulating the VLCC Tankers Freight markets and forecasting the Baltic Dry Index was given. Forecasting the demand for sea transport is very difficult since it is related to quantitative and qualitative variables with unforeseen trends. For this reason, the forecasting model FORESIM is “fed” with different scenarios and it generates a stochastic “description” of the future. Its main applications are:
• Decision support for trading Future Freight Agreements (FFAs) and various shipping market derivatives;
• Chartering strategy – spot or time charter, duration, etc.;
• Risk management for shipping investments, in combination with cash flow and monte carlo simulations providing distribution for financial variables;
• Estimation of financing risk such as probability of default etc. The subject brought a lot of questions even at the buffet reception which followed this successful presentation.

LMT is participating in the Hellenic Marine Environment Association’s (HELMEPA) series of training seminars in 2008, with a lecture entitled: “Safety Assessment and Management: from Theory to Practice”.
The lectures deal with the study and assessment of safety as currently one of the most important developments within the framework of maritime transport. The IMO has launched to date many relative activities focusing initially on the introduction of Formal Safety Assessment (FSA) and then on its effective enhancement and amelioration, by taking onboard specific operational needs, new areas of interest etc. In this outline, the lectures cover in brief the basic theory of risk, risk analysis and risk engineering (e.g. definitions, types of risk, techniques etc). Moreover, they present and analyze case studies (marine accidents) from the international literature in order to provide practical and hands on guidance for the implementation and exploitation of risk-oriented approaches and methods. Hence, the main target of such efforts is to identify the causes of accidents, both as starting points and escalation factors of the event under examination, to assess the accident producing conditions and to make realistic recommendations for the strengthening of the safety and environment friendliness of the maritime industry.
Speakers from LMT at the HELMEPA seminar series are Harilaos Psaraftis and Nikos Ventikos. The first lecture to Helmepa was given on Feb. 1, 2008

As pre-announced in the last issue of the newsletter, LMT organized a special New Year evening for its alumni and other friends on 13 February 2008. The event took place at the Piraeus Marine Club, in the heart of Piraeus, and more than 50 friends of LMT from the shipping industry were present. It was also a great pleasure to see there some of LMT’s international friends who happened to be in Greece at the time.
The traditional New Year’s Cake (“vassilopita”) was cut by Prof. Psaraftis and the lucky one was Theodossis Stamatellos of Hellenic Lloyd’s, who won the coin.
LMT would like to thank once more all of its friends for their presence in the event and their productive cooperation in 2007, and to wish a fruitful collaboration in 2008, as well as prosperity and health in their personal lives.

An LMT team spent two days at Det Norske Veritas (DNV) headquarters in Høvik, just outside Oslo, to kick off its three-year strategic collaboration programme, which also involves the Ship Design Laboratory in a separate project. The topic of collaboration between LMT and DNV is entitled “Effective Bulk Transport” and deals with the identification of win-win solutions for safe, secure and environmentally friendly maritime transport, and the evaluation of the impact of measures to enhance safety, security and environmental protection on system performance.
DNV and the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA) signed the strategic research & development collaboration agreement in Athens, Greece, on October 5, 2007.

2008 started with a flurry of activities for LMT. After three productive years, project EU-MOP (Elimination Units for Marine Oil Pollution) held its final meeting in Madrid in January, together with an industry workshop. LMT has been the coordinator of this European Commission (DG-RTD) research project, whose purpose was to design a robotized system to respond to oil spills. The EU-MOP consortium included 13 partners from 6 European countries, and the work conducted included design of 5 different variants, analyses of propulsion, oil processing, robotics, logistics, cost-benefit and validation. More results will be reported in a future newsletter.
The project’s web site is at www.eumop.org.