
Applying machine learning to the freight industry - chungchungz
http://blog.traintracks.io/data-culture-interview-kontainers/
======
euske
Applying machine learning to any industry.

Here's a checklist that I just came up with:

    
    
      Step 1. Pick an industry. Any industry.
      Step 2. Find a problem that can be formulated as a function.
      Step 3. Is that function non-trivial? If not, go back to Step 1.
      Step 4. List all the input parameters for that function.
      Step 5. Is any of them accurately observable? If not, focus on that parameter and go back to Step 2.
      Step 6. Apply some ML to it. (Choice of the tech wouldn't matter that much.)
      Step 7. Had some improvement?

~~~
hayksaakian
Now write a startup AI and raise your millions

~~~
taeric
To be fair, that seems a pretty accurate list. You will find yourself stuck in
step two quite often.

~~~
zump
Wrong. What about an industry where data is either hard or unethical to gather
such as the medical industry?

~~~
taeric
Isn't that step 5? I took that to be: "Do you have all of the data necessary
to formulate an answer? If not, focus on solving that problem or eliminate the
need for the data you can't get by going back to step two and picking a
formula that doesn't need the data you can't get."

------
bkor
A lot of the statements made in the article are rather questionable.

Applying "digital learning" to saying schedules and saying that is a data
culture? If the input is bad, improve the input of the data. What is stated
regarding outdated schedules highly depends on the company. Some companies
might be bad, but why try to improve bad data?

It seems more that they don't know about the different schedules you usually
have. One is the proforma. It tells you that there should be a weekly call on
some weekday at some time. But then for practical purposes you look at the
estimated times the vessel arrives.

In the article they pretend that a vessel suddenly departed a day early
without anyone knowing. That's really not how that works. Cargo needs to be
delivered to the terminal. You're not going to silently advance such a vessel
and not be able to fill it up with cargo. Cargo which then stands at the
terminal for 6-7 days and causing problems for the next call (too much cargo).

Then this one: > We’re still pretty much the only company that tries
digitalization of an end to end shipment.

What about [https://www.inttra.com/](https://www.inttra.com/) ?

That the shipping industry as a whole is very inefficient is known. But it
still seems like a lot of statements made in this article are rather
questionable.

~~~
dfsegoat
> We’re still pretty much the only company that tries digitalization of an end
> to end shipment.

They are totally BS'ing there:

Diversified Transportation Services (DTS) has had digital end-to-end shipping
since at least 2009. That platform has made them a fortune. (Source: I worked
with them for 5+ years and selected them as our preferred 3PL vendor because
it was all web-based from end-to-end):

[http://www.dtsone.com/our-technology/](http://www.dtsone.com/our-technology/)

~~~
charleetm
So I went to the site and you can't make a booking there. So you have to email
in for a quote. Where is the digitalization there?

------
Animats
Flexport, which is a YC company, seems to be doing the same thing. Their guy
is on here regularly and should have something to say about this.

Flexport, though, is an real freight forwarder. They take responsibility for
end to end delivery as a common carrier. If you shipped through Flexport and
it's stuck on a bankrupt Hanjin ship somewhere, it's Flexport's job to get it
unstuck. Does Kontainer do that? They seem to be more like a price and
schedule comparison site / lead generation system.

~~~
fauria
Xeneta does it as well. They published an article a few months ago explaining
how they use NLP to help their sales team with lead qualification:
[https://medium.com/xeneta/boosting-sales-with-machine-
learni...](https://medium.com/xeneta/boosting-sales-with-machine-learning-
fbcf2e618be3#.we0iu9t6i)

~~~
charleetm
Xeneta is more on data analytics of freight rates and doesn't allow bookings.
So not a competitor to Kontainers

------
bigger_cheese
That was an interesting article. In the past I have worked with bulk commodity
shipping (i.e ore + coal) rather than commercial freight. In my case the
company owned the berth the and the unloaders. So it was a similar but
slightly different problem space. The biggest issue was obtaining a reliable
schedule from the ships. When I worked there the harbor master communicated
directly with ships captain about expected arrival date etc and it was all
stored on spreadsheets.

There is probably room in this space for some ML smarts similar to what is in
the article (extrapolating arrival times based on weather, ships condition,
Panama Canal data etc.) and forecasting ahead for a more accurate arrival
date.

The benefit for doing this is because of something called "Demurrage" which
comes into play. Demmurage is a special type of charge that is incurred when
there are unloading delays. It wasn't unheard of because of the absence of
accurate scheduling for multiple ships to arrive within close proximity of
each other. When this happened the ships would be forced to lined up outside
of the harbor either waiting for tug boat availability to tow them into berth
or waiting for actual space on the berth. They'd be sitting there racking up
demurrage charges. There is a pay off in optimising berth scheduling, whether
its large enough to build a company around I'm not sure...

~~~
Fiahil
> There is a pay off in optimising berth scheduling, whether its large enough
> to build a company around I'm not sure...

It's a small but quite lucrative market. We're talking about less than 10
players for 10M+ contracts.

Do you know if demurrage charges are applied for vessels sitting offshore as
storage?

~~~
notahacker
As I understand it the demurrage charges apply when a third party doesn't
receive the goods (or the use of the ship) by the expected time, so presumably
isn't applied if the ship is intended to hold the goods offshore over a
particular period.

There's a big market in scheduling and monitoring systems for commercial
aviation but the economics are very different (delays equal very expensive
fuel burn and have safety and environmental implications, schedules are tight
and turnaround and connection times measured in minutes, time slots at certain
airports are multimillion dollar tradeable assets) as is the level of
regulation.

------
platz
What happened to the gold standard of logistics industry, which is Operations
Research (OR)?

OR has essentially been customized to this domain long before generalized ML
appeared on the scene - I can't imagine some of-the-self sci-kit learn
libraries have improved on this much.

~~~
zump
I think OR only works if the models are linear.

~~~
srean
Huh! what ?

I think you are thinking of linear programming, and OR is way more than that.
OR is the first chapter of an OR book.

~~~
srean
Too late to edit, meant LP is the first chapter in an OR book.

------
ehmuidifici
Freight Industry is not that simple, though. In some ports, it envolves a huge
infrastructure, country laws (inspections from health authorities, customs and
even navy sometimes) and so on.

In that case, 20 calls are just the beginning. You can't ship a matchbox
without hiring a company to do the (sometimes dirty) job for you. Data culture
worth nothing in places like that.

~~~
dfsegoat
Spot on. I love ML, I love the potential. But as a former logistics systems
manager I would NEVER trust anything that applied "fuzzy" logic to the already
frangible processes that are involved in working in (and depending on)
international logistics and 3PL.

Customs brokerage is the big thing for me - there is no substitute for a great
customs brokerage house - those guys and gals work magic and have contacts at
every level in even the most obscure countries in the world.

------
kyllo
A potential problem with this business model is that small-medium enterprises
who lack logistics departments (target market for the product) tend to buy
their goods Delivered Duty Paid, which means the seller arranges the
transportation. If the seller is in China, they are _required by law_ to
appoint a licensed freight forwarder agent to place the ocean booking for
them. So you really cannot play ball in the eastbound transpacific trade until
you have a licensed operation in the PRC--which requires forming a Joint
Venture corporation with a Chinese company.

And it sounds like this company wants to streamline online booking, SLI and
B/L creation and shipment tracking, but I don't think I saw anything about
handling ordering of or payment for the goods themselves, so it's still up to
the buyer and seller to arrange purchase orders, commercial invoices, letters
of credit, etc.

------
rokob
"We’re still pretty much the only company that tries digitalization of an end
to end shipment."

Bullshit

------
triplesec
HN interface comment: This list is displayed badly in Android Chrome. I get an
invisible 24-char-wide horizontally scrolling box to see the items in.
Definitely suboptimal for reading. fovc's comment below in this thread also
demonstrates this issue in the list.

Does anyone else have this issue?

~~~
flueedo
Why not get one of the hacker news reader apps? I use one called
'Materialistic'.

~~~
uberstuber
Why should we need an app to read a website?

~~~
flueedo
We shouldn't. But one is free to make that choice, while awaiting for the
possible improvements that would resolve the website issues praguing them.

~~~
flueedo
*plaguing

