Dynamic determination of vessel speed and selection of bunkering ports for liner shipping under stochastic environment

Abstract

In this work, we study a liner shipping operational problem which considers how to dynamically determine the vessel speed and refueling decisions, for a single vessel in one service route. Our model is a multi-stage dynamic model, where the stochastic nature of the bunker prices is represented by a scenario tree structure. Also, we explicitly incorporate the uncertainty of bunker consumption rates into our model. As the model is a large-scale mixed integer programming model, we adopt a modified rolling horizon method to tackle the problem. Numerical results show that our framework provides a lower overall cost and more reliable schedule compared with the stationary model of a related work.