Coordinating vessel recovery actions: Analysis of disruption management in a liner shipping service

Abstract

Disruptions often occur in liner shipping networks, and they are costly. When they occur, freight companies evaluate their effects on freightage in the pipeline and take the appropriate recovery actions by balancing customer service levels and increases in fuel consumption while accounting for environmental impact (greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions). The paper, therefore, develops an integrated mixed-integer programming problem (MIPP) that jointly minimizes the total voyage and transshipment costs and penalty charges for emitting GHG excess amounts beyond what is allowed. It does so by recovering a pre-established schedule of disrupted containerships. The solution to the MIPP suggests how to reconfigure the liner shipping network when skipping one or more call ports and determines the optimal velocity on assigned routes. The paper also develops and proposes a new and efficient algorithm based on the Crowd-Learning Particle Swarm Optimization (CLPSO) to solve this large-scale problem and shows the CLPSO to be superior to the potential ones in the literature. Computational experiments, based on data from a maritime shipping company, demonstrate the effectiveness of both the MIPP and CLPSO using several comparative metrics with suitable assumptions. The numerical results show that the developed MIPP has a potential application in practice.