Towards the optimal solution of feeder container ships routing with empty container repositioning

Abstract

This paper presents a designing method to route a feeder container ship within a hub-and-spoke network that incorporates empty containers repositioning among the ports that are called. It enables to determine the sequence of calling ports as well as the number of full and empty containers transported between any two calling ports. The method is based on a Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) formulation which enables to find optimal transport routes of feeder container ships, i.e. routes that maximize the profit of a shipping company. Our MILP formulation is based on a Knapsack problem and is converted to a location routing problem. The MILP model is tackled by the commercial CPLEX MIP solver. The results of the analysis show that the model can support the decision making process of a shipping company in establishing container feeder transport services. Proposed MILP models can be adapted, by simple changes, to various practical cases.