A note on liner ship fleet deployment

Abstract

Liner ship fleet deployment is the assignment of ships to liner service routes for delivering containers in a planning horizon. This paper first reformulates the maximum number of voyages that can be completed in the planning horizon, which is incorrectly defined by the existing studies on liner ship fleet deployment. It proceeds to remedy a constraint in Gelareh and Meng (Transp Res 46E:76-89 2010) such that the nonlinear programming model proposed by Gelareh and Meng (Transp Res 46E:76-89 2010) is equivalent to its linear formulation. Finally, a reformulation of the fleet deployment model is presented to eliminate the combinatorial behavior of the model proposed by Gelareh and Meng (Transp Res 46E:76-89 2010). Computational study demonstrates significant efficiency improvement of the reformulated model. © 2011 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.