Dynamic container slot allocation for a liner shipping service

Tingsong Wang, Qiang Meng and Xuecheng Tian

Transportation Research Part B: Methodological, 2024, vol. 179, issue C

Abstract: In this paper, we study a dynamic container slot allocation problem (DCSAP) for a liner container shipping company that aims to make an acceptance or rejection decision to each dynamically arriving container slot booking request. To capture the dynamic arrival feature and real-time acceptance/rejection decision of the booking request, we formulate the DCSAP as a dynamic programming (DP) model with the objective of maximizing the total revenues generated by accepted container booking requests over the entire booking horizon. Due to the well-known curse of dimensionality of solving a DP model, we develop a series of models to transform the intractable DP model into a solvable approximate linear programming (ALP) model. We further propose a spatiotemporal-heterogeneity-based (STH-based) decomposition preprocessor by identifying the spatiotemporal property of the DCSAP before solving the ALP model. Extensive numerical experiments are conducted to assess the applicability of the developed research methodology.

Keywords: Dynamic container slot allocation; Liner shipping services; Dynamic programming (DP); Approximate linear programming (ALP); Decomposition algorithm (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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DOI: 10.1016/j.trb.2023.102874

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