Bunker Consumption Optimization in Liner Shipping: A Metaheuristic Approach

Taking into account increasing volumes of the international seaborne trade, liner shipping companies have to ensure efficiency of their operations in order to remain competitive. The bunker consumption cost constitutes a substantial portion of the total vessel operating cost and directly affects revenues of liner shipping companies. “Slow steaming” became a common strategy among ocean carriers to decrease vessel sailing speeds and reduce bunker consumption costs. However, decreasing vessel sailing speeds may require deployment of more vessels on a given shipping route to provide the agreed service frequency at each port of call. Several bunker consumption optimization methods were developed in the past to capture those conflicting decisions. This paper describes existing bunker consumption optimization methods, outlines their drawbacks, and proposes a new metaheuristic approach. Numerical experiments demonstrate efficiency of the suggested metaheuristic in terms of solution quality and computational time. Keywords-Maritime Transportation, Liner Shipping, Bunker Consumption Optimization, Metaheuristics __________________________________________________*****_________________________________________________