On July 11th, 2017, in Room A716 of the New Main Building, Dr. Qiang Meng, a Professor in Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at National University of Singapore, was invited to give a lecture entitled "Container Slot Booking Forecasting for Intercontinental Liner Shipping Services". The lecture was hosted by Associate professor Tianliang Liu. More than 20 audiences attended, including professors, graduate and undergraduate students from Beihang university, University of Windsor, Beijing Jiaotong University and North China University of Technology.
Intercontinental shipping services link the trades between different continents in the global logistic system. During the container slot booking period before the start of a new ship voyage in an intercontinental service, the shipping company would like to estimate the actual amounts of container slot bookings that will be transported through the long-haul legs of the service.
In this lecture, aiming to forecast the container slot booking amount through the long haul legs of the intercontinental shipping service based on the historical container slot booking data, Prof. Meng introduced an integrated forecasting model. The model is able to combine the predictions from different forecasting models, including piecewise liner regression model, autoregressive model and artificial neural network model, by calculating weighted average of these three models. Test results on the real-case container slot booking data from several intercontinental services show the satisfactory forecasting precision of the model.
Dr. Qiang Meng is currently a Full Professor in Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at National University of Singapore (NUS), Co-director of NUS-LTA Transportation Research Centre and an urban mobility panel number of National Science Foundation under the Prime Minister’s Office of Singapore. Dr. Meng received his PhD from the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in 2000. His research focuses include transportation network modeling and optimization, shipping and intermodal freight transportation network analysis, and quantitative risk assessment of transport operations. He has published more than 139 SCI indexed articles on the leading transportation and logistics journals, with the SCI index rate of 27. Some of his studies have been successfully used by the transportation and maritime industries, including QRAFT – a software package for the quantitative risk assessment of urban road tunnels. He is an Associate Editor of Transportation Research Part B, Journal of Transportation Engineering (ASCE) and Transportation Research Part E. He has clinched a number of awards and prizes, including Outstanding Alumni Award of Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in 2016, Dean’s Chair Professor in Faculty of Engineering at NUS in 2015, the 13th World Conference on Transportation Research (WCTR) Society Prize for the best paper (2013), Best Paper Award for Methodological Development in the 9th EASTS (East Asia Society for Transportation Studies) International Conference (2011), Best Paper Award of AHB40 - Highway Capacity and Quality of Service Committee - in the 90th TRB Annual Meeting (2011) and Singapore MOT (Ministry of Transportation) Minister’s Innovation Award 2009.
