Container Liner Shipping Network Design Based On Column Generation Algorithm

With the rapid development of the global economy, the volume of international trading is increasing year by year. Shipping companies have to plan and design some reasonable routes, and to make the rational allocation of resources to the greatest extent to meet the transportation of goods delivered on time in order to gain a foothold in the market and to obtain greater profits under the pressure of competition. At present, at home and abroad research on container shipping transportation mainly concentrate in container shipping route design, fleet planning, ship management schedule developed and so on. Although the content of research is widely, few people consider the restriction of delivery deadline from ports in the container shipping network design, and the existing methods to solve the model also need to improve on the calculating speed and accuracy at the same time. Therefore, the main problem solved in this paper is how to design the liner shipping network reasonably and design a solving method fast and effective.Based on the definition of container liner shipping network, we first analyze the importance of container liner shipping network design, and then elaborate the design content and principles. Secondly, considering an actual constraint condition that the actual time from original to destination of goods cannot overtake the time of delivery deadline, we build the objective function with maximum annual profit mixed-integer non-linear programming model. Finally, the liner trade lane of9major ports on East Asia-Europe route is analyzed as an example. For the mixed-integer non-linear programming model, a column generation based heuristic method is proposed for solving this problem under the solver CPLEX software. The final result of shipping network design is obtained which shows that the model and algorithm is effective and reliable for the design of container liner shipping network. This solution provides a more reasonable decision support for the network design of container liner companies.