Highlights Container shipment demand is a general function of transit time. Space-time network model enables link-flow formulation. Polynomial-time solution algorithm due to weekly services.
Abstract This paper proposes a practical tactical-level liner container assignment model for liner shipping companies, in which the container shipment demand is a non-increasing function of the transit time. Given the transit-time-sensitive demand, the model aims to determine which proportion of the demand to fulfill and how to transport these containers in a liner shipping network to maximize the total profit. Although the proposed model is similar to multi-commodity network-flow (MCNF) with side constraints, unlike the MCNF with time delay constraints or reliability constraints that is NP-hard, we show that the liner container assignment model is polynomially solvable due to its weekly schedule characteristics by developing two link-based linear programing formulations. A number of practical extensions and applications are analyzed and managerial insights are discussed. The polynomially solvable liner container assignment model is then applied to address several important decision problems proposed by a global liner shipping company.
Liner container assignment model with transit-time-sensitive container shipment demand and its applications
Transportation Research Part B: Methodological ; 90 ; 135-155
2016-04-23
21 pages
Article (Journal)
Electronic Resource
English
Containership scheduling with transit-time-sensitive container shipment demand
Online Contents | 2013
|Multi-period liner ship fleet planning with dependent uncertain container shipment demand
Taylor & Francis Verlag | 2015
|