Ship routing in inland waterway liner transportation with foldable and standard empty containers repositioning

This paper addresses the container ship routing problem in inland waterway liner transportation. Given estimated weekly full container shipping demands between port pairs and the potential empty container demands at each port, our goal is to design the container ship route and determine the amount of foldable and standard empty containers to be shipped between each port pair in the context of navigational restrictions, so as to maximize the profit of the shipping services. To save possible leasing or storage costs of empty containers at various ports and meet navigational restrictions, the release of foldable containers and the repositioning of empty containers were taken into account in the decision. Two mixed integer programming models are established to optimize ship route and shipping strategies under splittable and unsplittable demands. The models are further improved by projecting arc variables for simulating the transportation of empty containers, and the improved model has fewer decision variables and higher computational efficiency. Numerical experiments based on the Yangtze River are conducted to test the applicability of methods. Finally, some reference recommendations are presented.

Automated summary

This paper focuses on the container ship routing problem in inland waterway liner transportation. The objective is to design the container ship route and determine the amount of foldable and standard empty containers to be shipped between each port pair to maximize profit. Two mixed integer programming models are established to optimize ship route and shipping strategies, and the models are further improved for higher computational efficiency. Numerical experiments on the Yangtze River are conducted to test the methods, and reference recommendations are provided.