Modelling ship's routing bounded by the cycle time for marine liner

Abstract

This paper addresses the problem of determining an optimal routing that bounded by the cycle time for marine liner. Through exploring the practical planning procedure of shipping company and analyzing the core of route design, this problem is realized as similar as the traveling salesman problem (TSP), but, with some specially industrial properties. A mixed integer programming model is proposed to optimize ship's routing under satisfying the relationships between the cycle time and deployed vessels with given service frequency in a week. Some constraints, besides, are organized to avoid the routing sequence has separated tours. Intuitively, we also divide the solving procedure into two parts. The first chooses some visited ports from relaxed problem as routing candidates for determining the final routing in the next, both through implemented by the branch-and-bound algorithm. Test results show that our procedure can obtain the suitable route service plan within the stable consumed CPU times of calculation.