Here, we describe a real planning problem in the tramp shipping industry. A tramp shipping company may have a certain amount of contract cargoes that it is committed to carry, and tries to maximize the profit from optional cargoes. For real long-term contracts, the sizes of the cargoes are flexible. However, in previous research within tramp ship routing, the cargo quantities are regarded as fixed. We present an MP-model of the problem and a set partitioning approach to solve the multi-ship pickup and delivery problem with time windows and flexible cargo sizes. The columns are generated a priori and the most profitable ship schedule for each cargo set-ship combination is included in the set partitioning problem. We have tested the method on several real-life cases, and the results show the potential economical effects for the tramp shipping companies by utilizing flexible cargo sizes when generating the schedules. © 2007 Operational Research Society Ltd. All rights reserved.
CITATION STYLE
Brønmo, G., Christiansen, M., & Nygreen, B. (2007). Ship routing and scheduling with flexible cargo sizes. Journal of the Operational Research Society, 58(9), 1167–1177. https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.jors.2602263
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