The berthing of an ultra large ship is always a difficult issue and becomes yet more complex when vessels must be handled in restricted manoeuvring areas of limited depth, exposed to a forceful crosswind, or manoeuvring in a strong current, or all three. The final approaching manoeuvre and precise positioning is particularly demanding at container terminals where many STS cranes are located along the quay, seriously limiting margin for error in the process of mooring a ship, especially when the cranes are located nearby a bridge wing or at the very edge of the pier. In order to avoid collisions, the final manoeuvre (side-push) must be fully controlled; the ship’s orientation must be parallel with the quay while maintaining the minimum lateral approaching velocity without significantly shifting the vessel longitudinally. The mooring of a Ro-Ro vessel is occasionally even more challenging: a precise docking manoeuvre is normally executed without any towing assistance. In this paper low cost laser-based berthing and docking systems developed for the ports of Koper and Swinousce are presented and several berthing manoeuvres are analysed and compared with the most commonly used GNSS-based navigational aid system portable pilot units (PPU).

When it comes to analyzing cruise port performance, port operators have a challenging task because there are no widely accepted or well-known procedures for evaluating cruise port performance. Any performance measures used by port authorities are rough and only offer an approximation of the terminal’s operational performance. Therefore, the purpose of this article is to present a multi-criteria assessment model to assist port authorities in evaluating cruise port performance from a multidisciplinary perspective. We investigated the compatibility and utility of combining the AHP and TOPSIS methods in a proposed MCDA model for assessing cruise port performance. The AHP method was used to provide the weights of port performance indicators, and the TOPSIS method was used to assess the port performance and to create a rank list of ports. A case study involving four Mediterranean cruise ports, Barcelona, Piraeus, Civitavecchia, and Marseille, was used to show the model’s application. The case study results reveal that the safety–environmental aspect is the most important aspect in assessing cruise port performance. We compared the proposed model to a state-of-the-art paper and discovered that our model can successfully cope with various multi-criteria models for port performance assessment.

Cruise shipping has been extremely popular in recent years, and one of the fastest-growing areas has been the Mediterranean. In the paper, we examine the evaluation of possible competitive–cooperative relationships among Mediterranean cruise ports for the period 2000–2017. To this end, we use three models: the dynamic shift-share model, the Lotka–Volterra model (LVM), and the logistic model (LM). The evaluation of basic market indices is included for completeness. The analysis shows that cruise traffic is in a saturation phase. The shift-share and LVM models reveal that interaction among ports is not significant for the large ports, but could be essential for the small ones.

The marine ecosystem is necessary to be monitored as it is exposed to externalities and pollutants that affect biodiversity and the state of the underwater structures. There is a demand for a better, more dynamic, and safe monitoring approach to underwater research and inspection. The unmanned underwater vehicles are becoming a reachable and intuitive tool for underwater inspection, such as for the inspection of the marine hull of vessels, bridges, foundations, piers, pylons, and other support structures in ports. The main advantage of the use of the remotely operated underwater drone is cost and time-efficiency, as they allow to obtain information in a fast and safe way in real-time. In this paper we investigate the possibility of the use of a remotely operated underwater drone Power Ray for seabed observation and underwater structures inspection. It describes the re-sults of the field research collected from the use of low-cost underwater drone Power Ray. The data collected with an underwater drone presents footages of different underwater structures and areas in order to document the seabed state and underwater structures. Additionally, this article provides an overview of the problems in underwater inspection and monitoring, and possibilities offered by remotely operated vehicle Power Ray in solv-ing them. The results of the paper are not unique to working with a low-cost drone, but are illustrative of the challenges and problems that new users are likely to encounter when using this technology.

A technical study of the effects of the use of ABS and the type of road surface on a vehicle’s coefficient of friction when braking at maximum force is presented in this article. It was found that, with ABS, the coefficient of friction was on average 13% higher on dry surfaces and 30% higher on wet surfaces, resulting in a 14.3% reduction in stopping distance on dry surfaces and a 37% reduction on wet surfaces. Measurements were taken with the Vericom VC4000DAQ performance computer, which is a simple method used to measure braking performance on different surfaces with different tires. It was also observed that the friction coefficient decreases with tire age, with a moderate to high correlation between the two variables (age and friction coefficient). However, the model used in the study only explains a moderate amount of variability in the data. An estimate is presented in the article regarding tire wear, indicating that tires used for from five to eight years and driven at 12,000 km per year would wear 0.79–1.33 mm in one year, assuming that the original tread depth of the new tire is about 8–9 mm and the legal minimum tread depth in most European countries for all summer tires is 1.6 mm. The research recommends changing summer tires after six years of use if the driver travels an average of 12,000 km per year, as the tires’ weight decreases by 1.3 kg on average, the tread height decreases by 6 mm on average, and the friction coefficient decreases with age, leading to longer braking distances.