A main source of the articles in this special issue will be selected
papers from those presented at the 9th International Conference
on Intelligent Manufacturing and Logistics Systems (IML2013),
which was held in Shanghai, China, February 27th to March 2nd,
2013. Shanghai has been one of the largest port cities in Northeastern
Asia and currently has the largest volume of container throughput
in the world. With this background of the conference site,
during IML2013, many papers related to intelligent logistics systems
and global maritime transportation have been presented.
However, this special issue is also open to other papers not presented
at IML2013.