ABSTRACT
This chapter conducts a concise literature review of US maritime freight transportation before introducing several important databases and associated issues. This is followed by a simple framework anchored on Data mining and integration (DMI), Geographical Information System (GIS), and optimal flow assignment (OFA) for optimal global maritime flows between foreign and US seaports. the chapter highlights important US international trade patterns for top regions, countries, ports and routes. It reviews various databases to build a target maritime freight database and develop an integrative framework with DMI, OFA, and GIS to highlight the US global maritime freight flows at global, regional, country, port, and commodity levels. The chapter provides extensive 2D/3D visualization of optimal maritime freight movement for all and specific commodities. Various freight databases are processed for the target database in ArcGISTM, which provides various functions for data join, query, edit, and visualization and in TransCADTM, whose assignment module is used to produce OFA flows.
