Decision making in Roll-on/Roll-off operations

Jaehn, Florian; Wensing, Thomas; Wiedra, Frank

doi:10.1016/j.omega.2025.103396

Decision making in Roll-on/Roll-off operations

Publication date

2025-07-22

Document type

Forschungsartikel

Author

Jaehn, Florian

Wensing, Thomas

Wiedra, Frank

Organisational unit

BWL, insb. Management Science und Operations Research

DOI

10.1016/j.omega.2025.103396

URI

https://openhsu.ub.hsu-hh.de/handle/10.24405/22493

Scopus ID

2-s2.0-105012583597

Publisher

Elsevier

Series or journal

Omega

ISSN

0305-0483

Periodical volume

138

Article ID

103396

Peer-reviewed

✅

Part of the university bibliography

✅

Language

English

Keyword

Automotive supply chains

Maritime transportation

Maritime transshipment

RoRo

Abstract

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.

Version

Published version

Access right on openHSU

Metadata only access