Cargo mix and shipment planning problem with uncertainty

Abstract

International ocean container shipping is a huge investment business and carriers expect more benefits from improving the operational level cargo mix and shipment planning. In this paper, we describe the characteristics of the cargo mix and shipment schedule problem with uncertainty in a multi-period planning horizon, and propose a two-stage stochastic mixed integer programming model for the problem. The objective of the model is maximizing the expected profit over the possible decisions under the uncertainty of shipping capacities. A heuristic algorithm is proposed to obtain an approximate optimal solution for the problem. Finally, we give numerical experiments to demonstrate the efficiency of the algorithm. © 2005 IEEE.