LINER CONTAINER SHIPPING OPTIMIZATION: BUNKER MANAGEMENT, SERVICE DESIGN AND CONTAINER ROUTING

WANG YADONG

Publication

LINER CONTAINER SHIPPING OPTIMIZATION: BUNKER MANAGEMENT, SERVICE DESIGN AND CONTAINER ROUTING

WANG YADONG

Abstract

Liner container shipping provides container transportation services following fixed port rotations. It plays a critical role in global logistic systems but has suffered significant profit loss recently. This thesis focuses on three important decision issues directly affecting liner shipping freight revenue and operating costs: bunker fuel management and procurement, liner shipping service design, and multi-type container routing. In the bunker fuel management and procurement, this thesis optimizes the bunker refueling amount on each serviced ports and ship sailing speeds of a service network and plans the optimal bunker procurement by means of swap contract. In liner shipping service design, this thesis investigates how to design new shipping service and how to adjust the port calls in the existing services. Finally, the multi-type container routing maximizes the shipping profit by determining the number of multi-type containers to be transported over a shipping service network given the weekly multi-type shipping demand pattern.