Reliable Hub-and-spoke Network Design For Container Liner Transportation

Maritime transport is an important form of world trade.With the progress of science and technology and the increasingly fierce market competition,liner transportation industry is gradually developing towards the trend of large ships and forming a network of shipping routes.In order to deal with the uncertainty of market,it is particularly important for container liner companies to plan their route network reasonably.The hub-and-spoke network has become the main structure of the current Marine transportation network because it is easy to form economies of scale,effectively improve the utilization rate of ships and reduce transportation costs.The trend of network complexity leads to the increase of network vulnerability,and the transshipment and handling processes also increase the possibility of unexpected events.Hub port is a key node in the process of container transportation.Since the implementation of post-recovery strategy is often costly and passive,this paper considers the reliability of the network at the beginning of network design to ensure the reliability of transportation service completion.Once the hub port is disturbed by an emergency,the transportation tasks and services undertaken by the original hub is replaced by the backup hub.In this paper,the related theories of container liner transportation route,hub-and-spoke network and the reliability theory of network system are expounded,then summarizes the research status at home and abroad.Next,combined with the actual operation of container liner transport,the path form in the network is analyzed to obtain the composition of total cost of container flow transportation.Taking the minimum total cost as the objective function,the backup hub selection variable is introduced into the model to set the penalty cost caused by enabling the backup hub.An optimization model based on reliability is constructed.Finally,an example is designed to verify the feasibility of the model,sensitivity analysis was carried out by changing the parameter values.Considering the network reliability,the service reliability of the network is guaranteed effectively.It also improves the response ability of liner companies to emergencies,and makes up for the passivity and high cost of hub-interference recovery.The model constructed in this paper can assist liner companies to make decisions at the route network planning stage,and provide reference for the research on the reliability of Marine network.