Liner ship fleet deployment with container transshipment operations

This paper proposes a liner ship fleet deployment (LSFD) problem with container transshipment operations. The proposed problem is formulated as a mixed-integer linear programming model which allows container transshipment operations at any port, any number of times, without explicitly defining the container transshipment variables. Experiments on the Asia–Europe–Oceania shipping network of a global liner shipping company show that more than one third (17–22 ports) of the total of 46 ports have transshipment throughputs. Computational studies based on randomly generated large-scale shipping networks demonstrate that the proposed model can be solved efficiently by CPLEX.

► Container transshipment at any port any number of times.
► Explicit decision variables representing transshipped containers are not required.
► The model is efficiently solved by CPLEX for real-case problems.