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Ship Route Schedule Based Interactions Between Container Shipping Lines and Port Operators

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Handbook of Ocean Container Transport Logistics

Part of the book series: International Series in Operations Research & Management Science ((ISOR,volume 220))

Abstract

This chapter examines a practical tactical liner ship route schedule design problem, which involves the interaction between container shipping lines and port operators. When designing the schedule, the availability of each port in a week, i.e., port time window, is incorporated. As a result, the designed schedule can be applied in practice without or with only minimum revisions. We assume that each port on a ship route is visited only once in a round-trip journey. This problem is formulated as a nonlinear non-convex optimization model that aims to minimize the sum of ship cost, bunker cost and inventory cost. In view of the problem structure, an efficient dynamic-programming based solution approach is proposed. First, a lower bound of the number of ships is determined, and then we enumerate all possible numbers of ships. Given the number of ships, we can construct a space-time network that discretizes the time and represents the design of schedule. The optimal schedule in such a space-time network can be obtained by dynamic programming. The algorithm stops when the lower bound is not smaller than the optimal total cost of the best solution obtained. The proposed solution method is tested on a trans-Pacific ship route.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    In reality the liner shipping company will not pay the customers for their inventory cost.

  2. 2.

    If, for example,\(t^{\text{arr}}_{1} =167\), then the ship will return to the first port of call at time\(168m+167\). Therefore, the time horizon is\(168(m+1)\) hours rather than 168 m hours.

  3. 3.

    The precision of 1 h is more than sufficient for liner shipping applications.

  4. 4.

    G means “graph”.

  5. 5.

    \(c(m, t_1^{\text{arr}}) = \infty\) if\((t_1^{\text{arr}}, 1)\) is inactive or if there is no path from node\((t_1^{\text{arr}}, 1)\) to node\((t_1^{\text{arr}}+168m, N+1)\).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Mathematics and Applied Statistics, University of Wollongong, NSW, 2522, Wollongong, Australia

    Shuaian Wang, Abdurahim Alharbi & Pam Davy

  2. Strome College of Business, Old Dominion University, 23529, Norfolk, Virginia, USA

    Shuaian Wang

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  1. Shuaian Wang
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  2. Abdurahim Alharbi
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Correspondence to Shuaian Wang .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Dept. of Industrial Engineering & Logistics Mgmt, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Clear Water Bay, Kowloon, Hong Kong SAR

    Chung-Yee Lee

  2. Dept. of Civil & Environmental Engineering, National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore

    Qiang Meng

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Wang, S., Alharbi, A., Davy, P. (2015). Ship Route Schedule Based Interactions Between Container Shipping Lines and Port Operators. In: Lee, CY., Meng, Q. (eds) Handbook of Ocean Container Transport Logistics. International Series in Operations Research & Management Science, vol 220. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-11891-8_10

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