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1- Sharif university of technology
Abstract: (25 Views)
| Ro-Ro (Roll-On/Roll-Off) vessels are designed for transporting wheeled cargo and play an important role in maritime trade due to their ability to load and unload vehicles and goods quickly and efficiently. Iranian exports of perishable products to the Caspian littoral states, particularly Russia, are currently carried mainly by road transit, which suffers from long border delays, high costs and quality deterioration, while Iran owns no Ro-Ro vessel in the Caspian Sea. This study presents a preliminary techno-economic assessment of establishing a national Ro-Ro fleet in the Caspian Sea. The method comprises four steps: (i) extraction and monthly disaggregation of refrigerated perishable export statistics from the Tehran Chamber of Commerce database; (ii) derivation of the vessel dimensional constraints from two independent constraint sets, namely the Volga River, Volga-Don and Volga-Baltic waterways for the import option, and the dock capacity of northern Iranian shipyards for the domestic-build option; (iii) modelling of the round-trip voyage cycle based on a field survey at the northern ports, and determination of the required number of vessels; and (iv) estimation of the building cost by both a parametric method and a bottom-up SWBS breakdown. The results show that the bulk of perishable exports (roughly 60-90%, depending on the year) is destined for Russia, reaching 875 thousand tonnes in 1402 (2023-24). The preferred domestically built vessel is 140 m in length, 23 m in beam and 4.5 m in draft, carrying 53 refrigerated trailers equivalent to 954 tonnes of net cargo, with a round-trip cycle of 4.9 days on the Amirabad-Astrakhan route; accordingly a maximum of 24 Ro-Ro vessels is required to meet peak-month demand. The building cost per vessel is estimated at 12.06 million USD by the bottom-up method, decreasing by about 26% in a ten-ship series. The comparison shows that domestic construction is preferable to foreign purchase owing to its higher capacity, lower cost and lower sanction risk. |
Type of Study: Research Paper |
Subject:
Environmental Study
Received: 2026/05/20 | Accepted: 2026/11/1
Received: 2026/05/20 | Accepted: 2026/11/1
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