This paper surveys the extant research in the field of ocean container transport. A wide range of issues is discussed including strategic planning, tactical planning and operations management issues, which are categorized into six research areas. The relationships between these research areas are discussed and the relevant literature is reviewed. Representative models are selected or modified to provide a flavour of their functions and application context, and used to explain current shipping practices. Future research opportunities bearing in mind the emerging phenomena in the field are discussed. The main purpose is to raise awareness and encourage more research into and application of operations management techniques and tools in container transport chains.

Ocean container transport in global supply chains: Overview and research opportunities

Short-term liner ship fleet planning with container transshipment and uncertain container shipment demand

The network design problem in liner shipping is of increasing importance in a strongly competitive market where potential cost reductions can influence market share and profits significantly. In this paper the network design and fleet assignment problems are combined into a mixed integer linear programming model minimizing the overall cost. To better reflect the real-life situation we take into account the cost of transhipment, a heterogeneous fleet, route dependent capacities, and butterfly routes. To the best of our knowledge it is the first time an exact solution method to the problem considers transhipment cost. The problem is solved with branch-and-cut using clover and transhipment inequalities. Computational results are reported for instances with up to 15 ports.

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A branch and cut algorithm for the container shipping network design problem

https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01807145/document

The role of operational research in green freight transportation

Container shipping lines have been initiating various ship fuel efficiency management programs because bunker fuel costs always dominate the daily operating costs of a container ship. As the basis of these kinds of programs, we develop a viable research methodology for modeling the relationship between the fuel consumption rate of a particular container ship and its determinants, including sailing speed, displacement, sea conditions and weather conditions, by using the shipping log data available in practice. The developed methodology consists of an outlier-score-based data preprocessing procedure to tackle the fuzziness, inaccuracy and limited information of shipping logs, and two regression models for container ship fuel efficiency. Real shipping logs from four container ships (two with 13000 TEUs and two with 5000 TEUs) over a six-month sailing period are used to exhibit the applicability and effectiveness of the proposed methodology. The empirical studies demonstrate the performance of three models for fitting the fuel consumption rate of a ship and the industrial merits of ship fuel efficiency management. In addition, we highlight the potential impacts of the models developed in this study on liner shipping network analysis, as these models can serve as base models for additionally considering the influence of displacement and weather conditions on ship fuel efficiency and exhaust emissions.

Shipping log data based container ship fuel efficiency modeling

The liner-shipping network design problem is to create a set of nonsimple cyclic sailing routes for a designated fleet of container vessels that jointly transports multiple commodities. The objective is to maximize the revenue of cargo transport while minimizing the costs of operation. The potential for making cost-effective and energy-efficient liner-shipping networks using operations research OR is huge and neglected. The implementation of logistic planning tools based upon OR has enhanced performance of airlines, railways, and general transportation companies, but within the field of liner shipping, applications of OR are scarce. We believe that access to domain knowledge and data is a barrier for researchers to approach the important liner-shipping network design problem. The purpose of the benchmark suite and the paper at hand is to provide easy access to the domain and the data sources of liner shipping for OR researchers in general. We describe and analyze the liner-shipping domain applied to network design and present a rich integer programming model based on services that constitute the fixed schedule of a liner shipping company. We prove the liner-shipping network design problem to be strongly NP-hard. A benchmark suite of data instances to reflect the business structure of a global liner shipping network is presented. The design of the benchmark suite is discussed in relation to industry standards, business rules, and mathematical programming. The data are based on real-life data from the largest global liner-shipping company, Maersk Line, and supplemented by data from several industry and public stakeholders. Computational results yielding the first best known solutions for six of the seven benchmark instances is provided using a heuristic combining tabu search and heuristic column generation.

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J. Fernando Alvarez

Papers

A Base Integer Programming Model and Benchmark Suite for Liner-Shipping Network Design