The world shipping industry is risky involving high uncertainties, and maritime safety has a direct bearing on human life, property and health of the marine environment. Therefore, safety has always been the focus of maritime transportation. Total-loss marine accidents present the most serious accident type in terms of economic cost. It is therefore crucial for decision-making and guidance on rational safety resource allocation through the analysis and evaluation of the influential factors of total-loss marine accidents. Its novelty lies in the pioneering analysis of all the factors solely influencing total-loss accidents in the whole world region, hence aid the development of a big database on total-loss marine accidents for rational safety policy making. This paper involves 16 ship types and 13 main navigation sea regions and analyses the data on the total-loss marine accidents that occurred in the world from 1998 to 2018. As a result, 11 main influential factors are selected and evaluated by an improved entropy weight-TOPSIS model. The results show that, in the both models with respect to ship type and sea region, the main influential factors are foundering, stranding and fires/explosions. Based on such findings, this paper proposes a series of countermeasures with respect to different factors respectively, which will aid the relevant maritime safety authorities such as the International Maritime Organization and ship owners/operations to take effective risk control actions to avoid/reduce the occurrence of total-loss marine accidents in future.

Developing waterway-waterway transfer is an important path for Shanghai's container logistics to innovate service models. Taicang Express Line, a typical case of service model innovation, plays an important role in elevating the standing of Shanghai Port as a container hub port and in developing China (Shanghai) Pilot Free Trade Zone. From the three dominant transfer service models, the waterway-waterway transfer for container logistics of Taicang Express Line has the traits and experience in streamlining logistics processes, innovating logistics clearance models, saving logistics operating costs, offering port logistics cooperation experience for replications and promoting integration of regional port logistics resources. However, it also harbors issues in infrastructure construction, staffing, container resources allocation and transportation, transportation efficiency and policy innovation. In the future, efforts should be invested to strengthening the construction and staffing of port logistics infrastructure, optimizing the container resources allocation and transport of port logistics systems, improving the logistics transportation efficiency of Taicang Express Line, and pushing forward innovation of the synergistic policy mechanism for regional port logistics.

This study assessed the contribution of containerization to the development of Western Ports, Lagos Nigeria. The aim was to assess the influence of containerization on some indices of port development such as port infrastructure development, ship turnaround time, cargo dwell time and congestion. Questionnaire was used to gather information on the contribution of containerization to change in maritime trade in the country, the influence of containerization on terminal expansion, congestion, level of investment in container port infrastructure as well as the influence of such investment on container dwell time and ship turnaround time (TAT) and the competitiveness of container terminal within Nigeria port systems and with other developed container ports of the world. Secondary data used included statistics of reports of operations of Western Ports between 2000 and 2010 as reported by NPA, as well as reports of some selected ports derived from Containerization International Year Book, which were used in this study for the sake of global reference. Summary tables and ANOVA for the analysis of the data. Results revealed a significant contribution of containerization to maritime trade relative to the ports' annual records but with no significant influence on ship turnaround time, cargo dwell time congestion which are determinants of port productivity and competitiveness. The study concluded that Western Ports have still not reaped gains of containerization and lacking in competitiveness when compared with other developed ports of the world.