An Ant Colonies Optimization Model For Container Marine Transport System

With the the process of integration of the global economy, the international trades between all of the countries and areas grow rapidly, it results in the arising and all-round development of international container transportation, also brings the whole ability of container fleet and transport shipping lines with more and more growing speed. Even more, it keeps step on the cost of transportation. As the coexistence of competation and cooperation within the area economy, to establish an open, reasonable and optimal global marine transport network has been the trend for all the ports.This paper, focusing on the problem of the minimum cost in the regional containers transport network, does research on modern optimal method to deploy the overseas container transportation reasonably. In consideration of its discreteness and nonlinear, it will be difficult to solve this problem with the traditional linear method, so in this paper, it brings in a new artificial intelligence optimal algorithm which is greatly inspired by the behavior of ants. The purpose is to find a method which can solve this nonlinear NP-complete problem of the transport network through using the optimization ability when the ants are finding food.Firstly, this paper constructs an optimization model for certain containers marine transport system by analysing the composing of cost in the process of container shipping from the point of view on scale economy. Secondly, the paper improves the algorithm to acclimatize to the transport model and does a qualitative calculation. Thirdly, combining with graph theory, it proved the ant colonies optimization algorithm can achieve to the best optimal solution within an acceptable time. Finally, the paper chooses certain representative ports as the nodes of network, and forecasts the container generating. After that, the quantificational calculation has been done. The results have shown that the optimization model constructed is obvious to reduce the integrated cost of container transport network, which provides a reference for the layout of containers transport lines and vessel types.Moreover, it's a trial to combine container transportation network with the new artificial intelligent method. The results have shown a great prospect for synthesized disciplin research.