Forecasting container transshipment in Germany

In this article, we examine container transshipment at German ports using the Seasonal Auto-Regressive Integrated Moving Average (SARIMA) model and the Holt-Winters exponential smoothing approach. Our models are designed especially to take account of the seasonal behaviour of the quarterly data used. We consider the dynamic development in this sector for the whole container throughput and also the destinations Asia, Europe and North America, which are the world's three main economic regions. Our data runs from the first quarter of 1989 to the fourth quarter of 2006. We provide detailed quarterly forecasts for the years 2007 and 2008. According to forecasting error measures such as mean square error and Theil's U, the SARIMA-approach yields slightly better values of modelling the container throughput than the exponential smoothing approach. Our forecast results indicate further strong growth for German container handling in total and especially for the destinations Asia and Europe. Only the container transshipment between Germany and North America shows rather small increases up to the end of 2008.