Network design and alliance formation for liner shipping

Maritime tranportation;Liner shipping;Network design;Alliance formation;Resource allocation

Agarwal, Richa ; Industrial and Systems Engineering

University:Georgia Institute of Technology

Department:Industrial and Systems Engineering

关键词: Maritime tranportation;    Liner shipping;    Network design;    Alliance formation;    Resource allocation;   

Others  :  https://smartech.gatech.edu/bitstream/1853/16314/1/Richa_Agarwal_200708_Phd.pdf

美国|英语

来源: SMARTech Repository

【 摘 要 】

In maritime transportation, liner shipping accounts for over 60\% of thevalue of goods shipped. However, very limited literature is available onthe study of various problems in liner shipping.In this thesis we focus on problems related to this industry.Given a set of cargo to be transported, a set ofports and a set of ships, a common problem faced by carriers in linershipping is the design of their service network.We develop an integrated model to design service network for the shipsand to route the available cargo, simultaneously.The proposed model incorporates manyrelevant constraints, such as the weekly frequency constraint on theoperated routes, and emerging trends, such as obtaining benefits fromtransshipping cargo on two or more service routes, that appear in practicebut have not been considered previously in literature. Also, we designexact and heuristic algorithms to solve the integer program efficiently.The proposed algorithms integrate the ship scheduling problem, a tacticalplanning level decision, and the cargo routing problem, an operational planninglevel decision, and provide good overall solution strategy. Computationalexperiments indicate that larger problem instances, ascompared to the literature, can be solved using these algorithms in acceptable computational time.Alliance formation is very common among global liner carriers however aquantitative study of liner alliances is missing from literature. Weprovide a mathematical framework for the quantitative study of these alliances.For the formation of a sustainable alliance,carriers need to agree on an overall service network and resolve issuesconcerning distribution of benefits and costs among the members of the alliance.We develop mechanisms to design a collaborativeservice network and to manage the interaction among the carriersthrough the allocation of profits in a fairway. The mechanism utilizes inverse optimization techniques to obtainresource exchange costs in the network. These costs provide sidepayments to the members, on top of the revenue generated by them in thecollaborative solution, to motivate them to act in the best interest ofthe alliance while satisfying their own self interests.