Reliable Liner Shipping Hub Location Problem Considering Hub Failure

Abstract

Hub ports play an important role in reducing the number of container routes and saving the operating costs of liner companies. However, hub failures caused by uncertainties such as natural disasters may cause huge recovery costs. Considering the accidental failure probability of hub ports and the reallocation of feeder ports, a global reliable liner shipping hub location problem (RLSHLP) is studied. We use the k-means algorithm to divide the global shipping network into different communities and propose two mixed integer linear programs to determine the hub port of each community. Then Benders decomposition algorithm is applied to the global RLSHLP and compared with our method. Numerical experiments verify the effectiveness of our method and determine the optimal hub port location scheme considering hub failure.