A novel hybrid-link-based container routing model

•A combination of origins and destinations in the formulation.•A general and compact hybrid-link-based model.•The choice of origins and destinations has the totally unimodular property.•New formulation for the multi-commodity flow problems.

Container routing determines how to transport containers from their origins to their destinations in a liner shipping network. Container routing needs to be solved a number of times as a subproblem in tactical-level decision planning of liner shipping operations. Container routing is similar to the multi-commodity flow problem. This research proposes a novel hybrid-link-based model that nests the existing origin-link-based and destination-link-based models as special cases. Moreover, the hybrid-link-based model is at least as compact as the origin-to-destination-link-based, origin-link-based and destination-link-based models in the literature.