Hello, I am Harilaos N. Psaraftis and I am Professor at the Department of Management Engineering DTU. In the period from 1989 to 2013 I was Professor of Maritime Transport at the School of Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering (NA&ME) of the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA), Greece.
I have a diploma from NTUA (1974), two M.Sc.degrees (1977) and a Ph.D. (1979) from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). I have been a faculty member at MIT from 1979 to 1989 (Department of Ocean Engineering, and also affiliated with the Operations Research Center and the Center for Transportation Studies). I received tenure at MIT in 1985, but left MIT to return to Greece in 1989.
In addition to my academic endeavors, I have served as CEO of the Piraeus Port Authority (OLP) for close to 5 ½ years, from 8/1996 to 3/2002. Piraeus is the largest port in Greece, and one of the largest of the Mediterranean, with significant passenger and container traffic. My tenure has been linked with such developments, among others, as (a) Pireaus putting itself on the list of the top 50 world container ports (No. 41 in 1998) and becoming the top hub of the Eastern Mediterranean, with traffic more than doubling from 575,000 TEU (1996) to 1,160,000 TEU (2001), and (b) OLP being transformed from a public law into a corporation (1999). I am the 3rdlongest serving CEO since OLP's inception in 1930, having served under 4 Ministers of Merchant Marine and 4 Presidents or Acting Presidents of the Board.
My main interests are transport optimization, and maritime and intermodal transport, with a focus on green transport and sustainability in recent years. At MIT I headed research projects on cargo routing and scheduling, scheduling of urban paratransit systems, management of marine oil spill response, automated mission and trajectory planning, and use of graphics for educational curricula in mathematical programming. At NTUA I have been project manager of some major research projects in practically all areas of maritime transport. I have been Project Manager of 3 EU multi-partner projects: (a) the Concerted Action on Shortsea Shipping (1995-2000), (b) EU-MOP project (Elimination Units for Marine Oil Pollution, 2005-2008), and ( c) SUPERGREEN project on the subject of European Green Corridors (2010-2013). LMT was also involved in three-year projects funded by the Norwegian and American classification societies Det Norske Veritas (DNV) and the American Bureau of Shipping (ABS) respectively, and a two-year collaborative research grant with the National University of Singapore (NUS). ) on the analysis of optimum containership size and its impact on liner operations (2008-2010), sponsored by the NOL Fellowship Program. LMT is a key pillar of the new NTUA Center of Excellence in ShipTotal Energy Emissions Economy, funded by The Lloyd's Register Foundation (2010-2015).
I have published my work in journals that include Operations Research, Management Science, Annals of Operations Research, Transportation Science, Transportation Research (B, C and D), European Journal of Operational Research, Networks, Journal of Hazardous Materials, Journal of Ship Research , Marine Technology, Maritime Economics and Logistics, Transactions RINA, WMU Journal of Maritime Affairs,Maritime Policy and Management, Marine Pollution Bulletin, Journal of Transportation and Environmental Engineering and Management Journal . My published work includes books, about 120 articles in journals and conferences, over 110 other publications (including 10 in book chapters) and over 130 lectures in various other conferences. I have also chaired and organized several conferences and clusters on topics such as intermodal transport, maritime transport, ports, vehicle routing, and logistics and have received severely academic and industry awards.
Since 2007 I have been an active member of the Greek delegation to the International Maritime Organization (IMO) and has been involved in several expert and working groups, chairing one of them. I was invited by the European Commission (DG-CLIMA) as an expert on the Working Group of the European Climate Change Program (ECCP) on reducing GHG emissions from ships (2011) and by the European Commission (DG-MOVE) to be member of the European Sustainable Shipping Forum (ESSF) Subgroup on Competitiveness, a group looking at the implications of sulfur regulations on short sea shipping (2014).
I have thus supervised 10 completed PhD theses (5 at MIT, 5 at NTUA), and have been on the committee for at least 24 other PhD theses (9 at MIT, at least 7 at NTUA, 5 in other Greek universities, 2 at NTNU-Norway). I also supervised 23 M.Sc. theses at MIT, at least 45 diploma theses at NTUA and 1 thesis at DTU. Since 1987 I am an Associate Editor of Transportation Science , a publication of INFORMS, or which I am a member. In 1999 I was the guest editor for a focused issue on maritime transport and in 2013 I had the same role for a focused issue of maritime transport and logistics.I have served as referee for at least 35 journals and 10 conferences, and as faculty promotion and tenure evaluator for the following universities: MIT, the University of Michigan (AnnArbor), the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), the Universities of Glasgow and Strathclyde (UK), the National University of Singapore (NUS), the World Maritime University (WMU) and the University of Montreal in Canada. I am serving as Departmental Academic Advisor to the Department of Logistics and Maritime Studies at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University for the 3 year period 2012-2014. Last but not least, I am a Fellow of SNAME since 2009.
I married to Alexandra Manousaki, with whom I have 2 children: Anastasia (1992) and Nikos (1994).
Below is a pic from my inaugural address at DTU (November 2013).
