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Cruise itineraries optimal scheduling

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Abstract

A cruise company faces three decision problems: at a strategic level, to decide in which maritime area and in which season window to locate each ship of its fleet; at a tactical level, given a ship in a maritime area and in a season window, to decide which cruises to offer to the customers; at an operational level, to determine the day-by-day itinerary, in terms of transit ports, arrival and departure times and so on. This paper focuses on the tactical level, namely on the Cruise Itineraries Optimal Scheduling (CIOS), aiming at determining a scheduling of cruises with the objective to maximize the revenue provided by a given ship placed in a specified maritime area, in a selected season window, taking into account a number of constraints. In particular, we refer to luxury cruises, implying several additional considerations to be taken into account. We propose an Integer Linear Programming (ILP) model for such a CIOS problem. This model has been experimented by a major luxury cruise company to schedule the itineraries of its fleet in many geographical areas all over the world. A commercial solver has been used to solve the ILP problem. Here we report, as illustrative examples, the results obtained on some of these real instances to show the computational viability of the proposed approach.

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Notes

  1. ACTOR SRL is a Spin-Off of SAPIENZA University of Rome (www.actorventure.com).

  2. The name of the ports are reported according to the United Nations Code for Trade and Transport Locations (UN/LOCODE Code List ) which is a combination of a 2-character country code and a 3-character location code (e.g., PTLIS denotes Lisbon in Portugal, ITCVV indicates Civitavecchia, the port of Rome, in Italy, GRPIR Piraeus, port of Athen, in Greece). The complete list can be found at www.unece.org/cefact/locode/service/location.html.

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Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank the anonymous referees for their useful suggestions and comments which led to improve very much the paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. ACTOR SRL Spin-Off of SAPIENZA University of Rome, Rome, Italy

    Gianni Di Pillo & Marcello Fabiano

  2. Department of Computer, Control and Management Engineering “A. Ruberti”, SAPIENZA University of Rome, Rome, Italy

    Stefano Lucidi & Massimo Roma

Authors
  1. Gianni Di Pillo
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  2. Marcello Fabiano
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  3. Stefano Lucidi
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  4. Massimo Roma
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Correspondence to Massimo Roma.

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Di Pillo, G., Fabiano, M., Lucidi, S. et al. Cruise itineraries optimal scheduling. Optim Lett 15, 1665–1689 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11590-020-01605-z

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