Designing robust liner shipping schedules: Optimizing recovery actions and buffer times

Judith Mulder and Rommert Dekker

European Journal of Operational Research, 2019, vol. 272, issue 1, 132-146

Abstract: It is important for liner shipping companies to maintain cost efficient and robust liner shipping networks. Regularly, they set up pro-forma schedules, yet it is difficult to stay on time. We consider the problem of managing the delays. Therefore, we need to determine an optimal recovery policy and buffer time allocation to the ship route in order to minimize the total costs associated with delays and recovery actions, such as increasing sailing speed. We introduce a general framework consisting of a mixed integer programming formulation to solve discrete stochastic decision problems with short and long term decisions and apply this framework to the above described problem. Furthermore, we propose and test four heuristics for this problem. We compared the results of our method with an existing liner shipping route schedule and found a cost decrease of 28.9% after optimizing the buffer time distribution compared to the cost of sailing the current route schedule at constant speed.

Keywords: OR in maritime industry; Discrete stochastic decision problems; Liner shipping; Robust scheduling; (Online) speed optimization (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0377221718304855
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ejores:v:272:y:2019:i:1:p:132-146

DOI: 10.1016/j.ejor.2018.05.066

Access Statistics for this article

European Journal of Operational Research is currently edited by Roman Slowinski, Jesus Artalejo, Jean-Charles. Billaut, Robert Dyson and Lorenzo Peccati

More articles in European Journal of Operational Research from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().