1.1 Introduction
The shipping industry had been fundamentally transformed by the expansion of international trade and technological innovations since the 1960s. Shipping in the past several decades was characterized by the increasingly popular use of containers for most general cargoes, of which in most cases is accompanied with liner shipping offering fixed, publicized schedules and routings between particular ports (Ng, 2006). Container transport is regarded as the world’s truly global supply chain due to the fact that a single cargo-laden container can be moved by different transport vehicles (e.g., vessels, trains, and trucks) and handled by various types of handling equipment and facilities from origin to destination along the entire end-to-end supply chain.
As a prelude to other parts of this study, this chapter will discuss the background upon which this study was initiated, the statement of problems that led to this study, the Aim and Objectives of the study. Others are Significance of the study, Scope of work, Research hypothesis and questions, Limitations of the Study and Definition of technical terms.
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