关键词: 水路运输, 航线设计, 列生成, 航速优化, 运输时限

Abstract:

To upgrade the profitability to a competitive level, the liner companies need to ensure that their container transit time between origin- destination ports would not exceed the market level. In order to satisfy customer demands and maximize the total profit for the whole shipping network, this paper takes the ship speeds as variables, and proposes a container liner shipping network design problem with transit time limits. To effectively solve the practical problem, firstly, a port clustering algorithm is used to select the main candidate ports. Then, the ports index sequence is determined by considering their geography position. Lastly, a column generation based heuristic algorithm is proposed to decompose and solve the model to obtain the final network solution. The algorithms are tested on benchmark instances with different problem sizes. Experimental results show that when taking ship speeds as variable rather than a fixed input, both the profit and flexibility of shipping network can be improved significantly.

Key words: waterway transportation, liner service network design, column generation, speed optimization, transit time