Ship scheduling with recurring visits and visit separation requirements

Abstract

This chapter discusses an application of advanced planning support in designing a sea-transport system. The system is designed for Norwegian companies who depend on sea-transport between Norway and Central Europe. They want to achieve faster and more frequent transport by combining tonnage. This requires the possible construction of up to 15 new ships with potential investments of approximately 150 mill US dollars. The problem is a variant of the general pickup and delivery problem with multiple time windows. In addition, it includes requirements for recurring visits, separation between visits and limits on transport lead-time. It is solved by a heuristic branch-and-price algorithm. © 2005 Springer Science+Business Media, Inc.