A collaborative decision support framework for sustainable cargo composition in container shipping services

Mevlut Savas Bilican (), Çağatay Iris () and Mumtaz Karatas ()
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Mevlut Savas Bilican: National Defence University
Çağatay Iris: University of Liverpool Management School
Mumtaz Karatas: Wright State University

Annals of Operations Research, 2024, vol. 342, issue 1, No 4, 79-111

Abstract: Abstract This paper proposes a decision support system (DSS) for optimizing cargo composition, and resulting stowage plan, in a containership of a shipping company in collaboration with en-route ports in the service. Due to considerable growth in transportation over years, an increasing number of containers are being handled by containerships, and ports consequently. Trade imbalances between regions and recent disruptions, such as LA/LB/Shanghai port congestion, blocking of Suez canal, drought in Panama canal, typhoons at ports, COVID-19 restrictions and the lack- and then over-supply of empty containers, have resulted in an accumulation of containers in exporting ports around the world. These factors have underscored the urgency of sustainability and circular economy within the shipping industry. The demand for container transportation is higher than the ship capacities in the recent times. In this regard, it is essential for shipping companies to generate a cargo composition plan for each service by selecting and transporting containers with relatively high financial returns, while offering a realistic stowage plan considering ship stability, capacity limitations and port operations. Ultimately, the selected containers should enable a ship stowage plan which keeps the ship seaworthy obeying complex stability considerations and minimizes the vessel stay at the ports, and port carbon emissions consequently, through efficient collaboration with en-route ports. This study provides a bi-level programming based DSS that selects the set of containers to be loaded at each port of service and generates a detailed stowage plan considering revenue, stowage efficiency and quay crane operational considerations. Numerical experiments indicate that the proposed DSS is capable of returning high-quality solutions within reasonable solution times for all ship sizes, cargo contents and shipping routes, supporting the principles of the circular economy in the maritime domain.

Keywords: Stowage planning; Shipping cargo mix; Sustainable shipping; Slot allocation; Revenue management in shipping; Bi-level programming (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
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DOI: 10.1007/s10479-024-05827-7

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