This paper studies the Feeder Network Design Problem (FNDP), which considers the design of a minimum cost liner shipping network for the transportation of cargo (containers) between a given hub port and a set of feeder ports. In addition to determining the services to operate (i.e., the routes), the FNDP deals with deciding the fleet of vessels to deploy on these services. In contrast to most FNDPs previously studied in the literature, the feeder network can, if found beneficial, be a hub-and-spoke system where cargo can be transshipped at any feeder ports. Thus, we denote our problem as the Feeder Network Design with Optional Transshipment (FND-OT). To solve the FND-OT, we propose a novel adaptive Heuristic with a special data structure for solution representation, which gives significant speed-ups. Furthermore, a new escape algorithm is used to escape from local optima. We show that the adaptive heuristic outperforms an existing solution algorithm in the literature on a set of realistic test instances. We also present results for a new set of instances adapted from a previously published benchmark suite (LINER-LIB) and show that including the possibility of having cargo transshipment in the FNDP can give significant benefits and reduced costs.

本文研究了支线网络设计问题 (FNDP)，该问题考虑了在给定枢纽港口和一组支线港口之间运输货物（集装箱）的最小成本班轮航运网络的设计。除了确定要运营的服务（即航线）之外，FNDP 还负责决定部署这些服务的船队。与之前在文献中研究的大多数 FNDP 相比，支线网络如果被发现有益，可以成为一个中心辐射系统，货物可以在任何支线港口转运。因此，我们将我们的问题表示为具有可选转运的馈线网络设计 (FND-OT)。为了解决 FND-OT，我们提出了一种新颖的自适应启发式算法，它具有用于解决方案表示的特殊数据结构，可显着加快速度。此外，一种新的逃逸算法用于逃避局部最优。我们表明，自适应启发式算法在一组实际测试实例上优于文献中的现有解决方案算法。我们还展示了根据先前发布的基准套件 (LINER-LIB) 改编的一组新实例的结果，并表明在 FNDP 中包含货物转运的可能性可以带来显着的好处并降低成本。