This paper proposes a liner container seasonal shipping revenue management problem for a container shipping company. For a given weekly multi-type shipment demand pattern in a particular season, the proposed problem aims to maximize the total seasonal shipping profit by determining the number of multi-type containers to be transported and assigned on each container route, the number of containerships deployed on each ship route, and the sailing speed of containerships on each shipping leg subject to both the volume and capacity constraints of each containership. By adopting the realistic bunker consumption rate of a containership as a function of its sailing speed and payload (displacement), we develop a mixed-integer nonlinear programing with a nonconvex objective function for the proposed liner container seasonal shipping revenue management problem. A tailored branch and bound (B&B) method is designed to obtain the global ε-optimal solution of the model. Numerical experiments are finally conducted to assess the efficiency of the solution algorithm and to show the applicability of the developed model.

Item Type:	Refereed Article
Keywords:	liner shipping, bunker consumption, revenue management, mixed-integer nonlinear programming model, global optimization, branch and bound
Research Division:	Commerce, Management, Tourism and Services
Research Group:	Transportation and Freight Services
Research Field:	Transportation and Freight Services not elsewhere classified
Objective Division:	Transport
Objective Group:	Water Transport
Objective Field:	International Sea Freight Transport (excl. Live Animal Transport)
Author:	Du, Y (Dr Bill Du)
ID Code:	113314
Year Published:	2016
Web of Science® Times Cited:	13
Deposited By:	Maritime and Logistics Management
Deposited On:	2016-12-20
Last Modified:	2018-03-22
Downloads:	0