Planning the route of container ships: A fuzzy genetic approach

Nowadays, liner shipping has become a constant operation model for shipping companies, and scheduling is an important issue for operation. It is well-known that a nice plan for route of container ships will bring long-term profit to companies. In the earlier works, the market demand is assumed to be crisp. However, the market demand could be uncertain in real world. Fuzzy sets theory is frequently used to deal with the uncertainty problem. On the other hand, genetic algorithm owns powerful multi-objective searching capability and it can extensively find optimal solutions through continuous copy, crossover, and mutation. Due to these advantages, in this paper, a fuzzy genetic algorithm for liner shipping planning is proposed. This algorithm not only takes market demand, shipping and berthing time of container ships into account simultaneously but also is capable of finding the most suitable route of container ships.