A fuzzy approach for container positioning considering sustainable profit optimization

•Formulation is based on the contribution margin, the key decision parameter in liner business.•The formulations optimize all flows simultaneously leading to improved results.•The FLP formulation successfully considers operational uncertainties.•Imbalanced trades and environmental burden are considered and successfully addressed too.

Liner companies are forced to operate efficiently due to regulatory and market competition patterns and requirements. Container positioning is a vital part of their strategy. Instead of minimizing costs of moving empty units as preferred in the literature, this paper presents a formulation that optimizes the trade-off between full and empty units. Paradoxically, carrying empty instead of full units in some cases leads to more profitable operations. This paper considers these as well as the derived CO2CO2 footprint aspects. Owing to the seasonality and incompleteness of data, a fuzzy optimization approach is chosen.