The modern shipping industry has reached maturity; market demand and landscape shifts force industry agents to find new pathways to successful development. The Northern Sea Route (NSR) as a new pathway between Europe and Asia brings both opportunities and challenges to global logistics systems. These circumstances make commercial exploitation of the route a subject of intense focus in many countries actively involved in sea transportation.

This book identifies specific problems and provides possible solutions to them by calling on the accumulated knowledge of researchers and practitioners with competencies from diverse areas, including transport and logistics, Arctic studies, IT and digital technologies, socio-economic systems analysis, hydrocarbon production, transport, business modeling, design of information systems and applications, and engineering requirements for IT services. It represents the integrated experience and expertise of researchers from Canada, Germany, Russia, and the Netherlands, including experts from oil and gas enterprises, shipping lines, logistics companies, and IT companies. 

Igor Ilin is head of the Graduate School of Business Engineering at Peter the Great Saint Petersburg University (Russia). Since 2008, he is the head of the business informatics educational programs and is leader of research in the area of the enterprise architecture, business engineering, digital transformation of companies, industries, and regions.

Tessaleno Campos Devezas is an associate professor with habilitation at Atlântica - Instituto Universitário (Portugal). He is known for his contributions to the long waves theory in socioeconomic development, technological evolution, energy systems, materials engineering as well as world system analysis. His main research interests embrace technological forecasting, futures studies, socioeconomic long waves, evolutionary economics, technological evolution, innovation theory and dynamics, complex adaptive systems, and new materials.

Carlos Jahn is head of the Institute of Maritime Logistics at Hamburg University of Technology (Germany) as well as of the Fraunhofer Center for Maritime Logistics and Services in Hamburg (Germany). He held various management functions in science and industry, and his key research interests are maritime logistics, IT, and digital technologies in logistics.