Robust planning and disruption management in roll-on roll-off liner shipping

• We propose a detailed model of the fleet deployment problem in RoRo liner shipping.
• A set of robustness strategies are added to the model to improve performance.
• To test the robustness strategies a simulation framework is developed.
• The results show that the proposed strategies significantly decrease operating costs.

This paper presents different strategies for handling disruptions in fleet deployment in roll-on roll-off liner shipping, which basically consists of assigning a fleet of vessels to predefined voyages at minimum cost. A new mathematical model of the problem is presented, including a set of robust planning strategies, such as adding slack and rewarding early arrivals. To solve real-life instances a rolling horizon heuristic is proposed. A computational study, where we also propose some recovery planning strategies, is conducted, and simulation results show that adding robustness significantly reduces the actual cost of the plan and the total delays of the voyages.