Vessel Schedule Design Optimization And Real-time Disruption Recovery In Container Liner Shipping

Container trade is the fastest growing cargo segment in world seaborne trade and is the backbone of the world trade business.Further,container trade highly improves the development of the modern logistics.Containers are generally carried by liner ships.In real-life,there are many disruption factors that bring bad effect to liner shipping service,like increasing operation cost and to deteriorate the service standards.In recent years,liner shipping operators and scholars are interested in decreasing adverse impact of disruptions on liner shipping services.This dissertation focuses on the research of disruption management in liner shipping which aims at solving three problems:(1)Reliable Vessel Schedule Design Problem(R-VSDP),(2)Container Flow Recovery Problem(CFRP)and(3)Vessel Schedule Recovery Problem(VSRP).Before solving the three problems,this dissertation first brings up with a framework of disruption management for liner shipping as a Top-level Design,to guide the research work.For the R-VSDP,this dissertation develops a new uncertainty processing method-Wave Optimization(WO),to enhance the reliability of the system in two dimensions-Tolerance and Resilience.The novel method is applied to the vessel schedule design optimization.A case study has been investigated to verify the effectiveness of the WO method and the vessel schedule design model based on WO.For the CFRP,the network form considered is a hub-and-spoke liner shipping network,and a compact integer linear programming model is presented and other shipping companies' services or other transportation modes(roadway,railway,and airline)as candidate alternative means to transport the miss-connected containers are also incorporated in the formulation.The effectiveness and solving efficiency of the proposed model for addressing large-scale cases are verified by numerical experiments.For the VSRP,four vessel schedule recovery strategies are involved in the problem:speed adjustment;shorten port time;swap order of calls and omitting a port call.Consider the container flow recovery problem when the strategy-omitting a port call is taken.A mixed integer nonlinear programming mathematical model is presented for the VSRP.As the problem is an NP problem,the proposed model is solved by the exact algorithm and genetic algorithm,respectively.Besides,the two solving approaches are compared in terms of solution superiority and solution efficiency.The results show that in real-scale case,the genetic algorithm is a little better in solving efficiency,while the exact algorithm is much better in solving superiority.To sum up,from the perspective of system science,this dissertation makes comprehensive optimizations(longitudinal and transverse)of the liner shipping disruption problems at the tactical level and operational level.The whole solution including the container flow recovery plan,the schedule recovery plan and the reliable vessel schedule design scheme is able to provide scientific and comprehensive disruption management decision support for liner companies.