Container Flow Recovery Strategy Under Insufficient Hub Capacity In Liner Shipping

Container liner shipping is affected by various uncertain factors which can be classified into regular uncertainty and rare disturbance according to frequency and regularities.As for the first category,liner shipping company can lighten its influence through strategic or tactic planning.While when it comes to disturbance,due to its low frequency of occurrence,even one-off characteristic,it is neither scientific nor economically reasonable to consider its influence through strategic or tactic analysis.Which means it can only be done afterward,realizing real-time recover of influence of disturbance from operational level.This paper takes a liner company which provides multiple route services in hub-spoke network as target,analyzing the recovery of container flow under scarce hub capacity.It introduces the choice between substitute hubs and substitute transportation modes,and constructs integer nonlinear programming model with minimized container delay cost and transportation cost as the objective function.In order to testify the feasibility of the model constructed,this paper carries out a case study with relevant data from Z container shipping company,and it turns out that the model can concludes optimized container flow recovery strategy,proving decision supports for liner companies.And the sensitivity analysis shows that the model is relatively more sensitive to the available capacity of original hub and the bigger the capacity coefficient,the lower the cost for liner company to recover.And in the meantime,the bigger the coefficient,the more voyages would choose the original hubs on the main line and the proportion of seaway transportation chosen for spokes is higher.The research is able to provide scientific support for decision-making of liner companies under insufficient hub capacity,easing the influence of disturbance,enhancing their service quality and lowering operational cost.