A variable neighborhood search heuristic for tramp ship scheduling

Abstract

This paper considers a classical ship scheduling problem in which the routing and scheduling of a heterogeneous fleet of ships with time windows for pick-ups and deliveries at multiple ports is required. Assuming fixed ship speeds, the problem of maximising profit is addressed. A variable neighborhood search metaheuristic is proposed for this problem. A computational evaluation compares this variable neighborhood search procedure with multi-start local search and a previous tabu search approach. Computational results show that variable neighborhood search provides both the best-quality solutions and the fastest computation time compared to multi-start and tabu search. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.