Purpose

This paper aims to examine containership routing and speed optimization for maritime liner services. It focuses on a realistic case in which the transport demand, and consequently the collected revenue from the visited ports depend on the sailing speed.

Design/methodology/approach

The authors present an integer non-linear programming model for the containership routing and fleet sizing problem, in which the sailing speed of every leg, the ports to be included in the service and their sequence are optimized based on the net line's profit. The authors present a heuristic approach that is based on speed discretization and a genetic algorithm to solve the problem for large size instances. They present an application on a line provided by COSCO in 2017 between Asia and Europe.

Findings

The numerical results show that the proposed heuristic approach provides good quality solutions after a reasonable computation time. In addition, the demand sensitivity has a great impact on the selected route and therefore the profit function. Moreover, the more the demand is sensitive to the sailing speed, the higher the sailing speed value.

Research limitations/implications

The vessel carrying capacity is not considered in an explicit way.

Originality/value

This paper focuses on an important aspect in liner shipping, i.e. demand sensitivity to sailing speed. It brings a novel approach that is important in a context in which sailing speed strategies and market volatility are to be considered together in network design. This perspective has not been addressed previously.

中文翻译：

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需求敏感的班轮运输网络设计

目的

本文旨在研究海运班轮服务的集装箱航线和速度优化。它侧重于一个现实案例，在该案例中，运输需求以及从访问港口收取的收入取决于航行速度。

设计/方法/方法

作者针对集装箱船航线和船队规模问题提出了一个整数非线性规划模型，其中每条航线的航行速度、服务中包含的港口及其顺序都基于净航线的利润进行优化。作者提出了一种基于速度离散化和遗传算法的启发式方法来解决大型实例的问题。他们在中远集团于 2017 年提供的亚洲和欧洲之间的线路上提交了一份申请。

发现

数值结果表明，所提出的启发式方法在合理的计算时间后提供了高质量的解决方案。此外，需求敏感性对所选路线的影响很大，因此对利润函数也有很大影响。而且，需求对航行速度越敏感，航行速度值越高。

研究限制/影响

没有以明确的方式考虑船舶承载能力。

原创性/价值

本文重点讨论班轮运输的一个重要方面，即需求对航行速度的敏感性。它带来了一种新颖的方法，在网络设计中将航行速度策略和市场波动性一起考虑的情况下，这种方法很重要。这个观点以前没有被提及。