Late Acceptance Hill Climbing for The Liner Shipping Fleet Repositioning Problem

Late Acceptance Hill Climbing (LAHC) has been shown to be an effective local search method for several types of optimization problems, such as on certain types of scheduling problems as well as the traveling salesman problem. We apply LAHC to a central problem in the liner shipping industry, the Liner Shipping Fleet Repositioning Problem (LSFRP). The LSFRP involves the movement of vessels between routes in a liner shipping network subject to complex costs and timing restrictions. We show that despite LAHC’s promising performance on other problems, it is unable to achieve the performance of simulated annealing on the LSFRP.