CONTAINER SLOT BOOKING CANCELLATION ANALYSIS AND SHIP CAPACITY CONTROL FOR LINER SHIPPING SERVICES

Abstract

To transport containerized cargoes, a container liner shipping company accepts customers’ booking requests of container slots prior to the departure of ships. It is a common practice for customers to cancel some of their bookings, which may lead to low loading rates of ships and a revenue loss for the shipping company. To resolve this pain point, this thesis investigates two correlated problems: the analysis of slot booking cancellation pattern and the strategies of capacity control to remedy the revenue loss incurred by the uncertain slot demand. Slot booking cancellation and the resulted uncertainty of slot demand motivate the ship capacity control problem. Four subproblems are addressed regarding the two key problems: (i) Slot booking cancellation analysis: data exploratory analysis of cancellation pattern and estimation of cancellation probability. (ii) Capacity control: decision on tactical slot allocation and policy of capacity control over the slot booking period.