Dear Readers,
I am very pleased to introduce the new 53(125) issue of the Scientific Journals of the Maritime University of Szczecin. Another year of activity on the publishing market is behind us. In 2017, the Scientific Journals of the Maritime University of Szczecin published as many as 61 scientific papers: 15 in issue 49(121), 13 in issue 50(122), 14 in issue 51(123) and 19 in issue 52(124). The scientific articles published in 2017 were prepared by 105 authors (in total, without repetitions). The percentage of Polish researchers in this group was 77.1% out of 61 publications. Internationally, the greatest contribution was from academics affiliated to Croatian institutes – 6 authors (5.7% of the total number of authors) and Iranian institutes – 7 authors (6.6% of the total number of authors), followed by Germany – 4 authors, Australia – 3 authors, Sweden – 2 authors and Finland and the Netherlands – 1 author each.
The current issue of the journal includes recent findings on shipbuilding, water transport, navigation and marine traffic engineering. The introductory paper for this issue entitled “Predicting the shipping market by spreads of timecharter rates” has been prepared by Prof. Tsz Leung Yip – Deputy Director at the C.Y. Tung International Centre for Maritime Studies, lecturer at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University and a world-class specialist in logistics and marine transport. This article explores the predictability of spreads between long-term and short-term timecharter rates on spot freight rates. This publication has been financed by the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Republic of Poland from the funds devoted to science-popularising activity: grant No. 790/P-DUN/2016. I hope that this material will prove informative to all readers interested in the issues of marine transport.
The Marine Technology and Innovation section includes papers on remote and unmanned navigation of vessels, equipment facilitating SAR actions as well as using state-of-the-art models in reliability analysis and ship design.
The section devoted to Navigation and Maritime Transport includes articles on exploitation aspects of using magnetic compasses, ship steering Nomoto model and ship traffic models application.
The Transport Engineering section is devoted to inland transportation and marine traffic engineering. Moreover, it discusses the quantitative analysis of the impact of fishing ships’ traffic streams on traffic streams of merchant vessels in the Polish maritime areas.
The section entitled Miscellaneous includes articles investigating the analysis of parameters influencing the suitability of the surface unit for search and rescue operation at sea as well as impact of Liquefied Natural Gas terminal on gas distribution and bunkering network in Poland.
I would like to take this opportunity to encourage authors from all over the world to publish their research in the Scientific Journals of the Maritime University of Szczecin. All readers are invited to visit our website, which now has a more intuitive layout. Under the http://scientific-journals.eu/ address it is possible to access the online version of the current issue as well as archival ones.
Assoc. Prof. Leszek Chybowski
Editor-in-Chief
Szczecin, 16 March 2018