ITRN 2026
Conference

Keynote Title:

Maritime and port decarbonisation and data analytics: Insights from academic and industrial projects

Abstract:

Maritime transport and port assets emissions are significant contributors to global greenhouse gas emissions, yet they also present substantial opportunities for innovation in decarbonisation and data analytics. This keynote brings together insights from recent academic and industrial projects addressing the transition toward low- and zero-emission maritime and port systems. The first part of the talk focuses on port electrification and intelligent power management. Ports, as large-scale energy consumers, can benefit from integrated energy management and operations planning frameworks. Evidence from recent projects demonstrates how strategies such as energy management and demand response programmes can significantly reduce total costs. The role and quantified benefits of renewable energy integration in port environments are also highlighted. The second part of the talk will discuss the transition to alternative fuels in maritime shipping as an alternative to electrification. A novel economic modelling framework is presented to support fleet-level transition planning under uncertainty, optimising fuel choices, such as diesel, bio-LNG, bio-methanol, and ammonia, while balancing emissions, investment, operational costs, and revenues. Finally, the talk presents findings from our industrial project on a green shipping corridor between Liverpool and Belfast. This initiative evaluates both port electrification and alternative fuel deployment in practice, identifying 29 pilot projects to advance implementation and deliver realistic discussions on large-scale maritime and port decarbonisation transition.

Bio:

Dr Iris Cagatay has been an Associate Professor (Senior Lecturer) in Operations and Supply Chain Management at the University of Liverpool Management School (ULMS), joined the school in August 2019. Prior to joining ULMS, Iris was a postdoctoral research in Singapore and Denmark. Dr Iris has research interests in transportation, logistics, energy, shared economy, alternative fuels and energy management, particularly focusing on freight transportation, next-generation ports, shipping, hinterlands, urban logistics, ride-hailing, bike-sharing, crowd-shipping, charging, electrification, district heat networks and microgrids. He mostly uses mathematical optimisation and data analytics methods to improve performance of these systems. He has more than 40 journal articles and these papers are published in top-tier journals such as European Journal of Operational Research, Transportation Research Part B: Methodological, OMEGA: The International Journal of Management Science, Transportation Research Part E: Logistics and Transportation Review, International Journal of Production Economics, International Journal of Production Research, Transportation Research Part D: Transport and Environment, Annals of Operations Research, Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, Computers & Industrial Engineering, etc. Dr Iris served as the director for the MSc in Business Analytics and Big Data (2022–2025) at ULMS. Dr. Iris is a senior editorial board member of Transportation Research Part E: Logistics and Transportation Review with Associate Editor duties, being on board since 2017 and Multimodal Transportation since 2022. He is an associate editor of European Journal of Industrial Engineering (EJIE) since 2023. He has participated in projects funded by Innovate UK, IAA (EPSRC and ESRC) and the Innovation Launchpad Network+.

https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/people/cagatay-iris

https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=vQbKKZ8AAAAJ&hl=en