Containerships Sailing Speed and Fleet Deployment Optimization under a Time-Based Differentiated Freight Rate Strategy

Abstract

This paper investigates the problem of containership sailing speed and fleet deployment optimization in an intercontinental liner shipping network. Under the consideration of the time value of container cargo, three kinds of impact of sailing speed changes on long legs of each liner route are analysed, and a time-based freight rate strategy is proposed. Then, the optimization problem is formulated as a mixed-integer nonlinear programming. Its goal is to maximize the total profits of a container liner shipping. To find the optimal solution to the model and improve the efficiency of model solution, a discretization algorithm is proposed. Numerical results verify the applicability of the proposed model and the efficiency of the algorithm. In addition, the time-based freight rate strategy is able to achieve more profit compared to a fixed freight rate strategy.

Document type: Article