Each shipping line is expected to establish a reliable operating model, and the design of ship schedules key operational consideration. Long-term profits for lines can be from well-designed schedule. In today’s liner service design, managing time factor critical. Shipping are prone different unexpected disruptions. Such disruptions would necessitate near-real-time analysis port capacity re-desi...

This paper reviews studies from the past 30 years that use operations research methods to tackle containership routing and scheduling problems at the strategic, tactical, and operational planning levels. These problems are first classified and summarized, with a focus on model formulations, assumptions, and algorithm design. The paper then gives an overview of studies on containership fleet siz...

This paper examines the changing business environment for ocean carriers and ports in terms of the new technologies that might be adopted in the period 2000–2010. It opens with a discussion of the two key supply segments, liner and tramp shipping, and explores their nature and how they have evolved since World War II. Issues like economies of scale and new technology adoption are discussed, pav...

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...

In this paper we consider the problem of designing a container liner shipping feeder network. The designer has to choose which port to serve during many rotations that start and end at a central hub. Many operational characteristics are considered, such as variable leg-by-leg speeds and cargo transit times. Realistic instances are generated from the LinerLib benchmark suite. The problem is solv...

A common problem faced by carriers in liner shipping is the design of their service network. Given a set of demand to be transported and a set of ports, a carrier wants to design service routes for his ships as efficiently as possible, using the underlying facilities. Furthermore, the profitability of the service routes designed depends on the paths chosen to ship the cargo. We present an integ...