Paper Details

TRB 90th Annual Meeting (January 23-27, 2011)

Event Number:	738
Event Title:	Modeling Theories and Practices in Freight Planning and Logistics
Event Date:	Jan 26 2011 2:30PM- 5:00PM
Event Location:	Shoreham, Blue Room Foyer
Event Description:
Event Agenda:

Schedule Design and Container Routing in Liner Shipping (11-0877)

A liner shipping company seeks to provide liner services with shorter transit time compared with the benchmark of market-level transit time due to the ever-increasing competition. When the itineraries of its liner service routes are determined, the liner shipping company designs the schedules of its liner routes such that the wait time at transshipment ports is minimized. As a result of transshipment, multiple paths are available for delivering containers from the origin port to the destination one. Thus the medium-term (3-6 months) schedule design problem and the operational-level container routing problem must be investigated simultaneously. This paper formulates the schedule design and container routing problem by minimizing sum of the total transshipment cost and penalty cost associated with longer transit time than the market-level transit time, minus the bonus of shorter transit time. The formulation is non-linear, non-continuous and non-convex. A genetic local search approach is developed to efficiently find good solutions to the problem. The proposed solution method is applied to optimize APL¡¯s Asia-Europe-Oceania liner shipping services and the results prove that it is effective and efficient in solving the practical problem.

Authors
     Wang, Shuaian , University of Wollongong, Australia
     Meng, Qiang , National University of Singapore