A new hub network design integrating deep sea and short sea services at liner shipping operations

Abstract

Liner shipping is an increasingly attractive maritime transport, not only by the growing volume of goods transported in the world, but also by the diversity of products that can be carried and its service stability. At liner shipping operation, a hub and spoke structure is often used in which deep sea services take place at the hub network and short sea services can be done in the regional network between the hub and its respective spoke nodes. In this work a new hierarchical structure of hub and spoke with sub-hub is presented. Deep sea services and short sea services are depicted in circular form and the sub-hubs are intersection points of neighbour's regional networks. Both cargo-routing with transhipment in hub ports or in sub-hub ports are allowed. The binary integer linear programming model proposed in this work offers, together, a hub location with multiple-spoke allocation problem, a service design problem and the cargo routing problem. Experimental results show good performances comparatively to the classic hub and spoke network structure.