Multi-objective collaborative agreements amongst shipping lines and marine terminal operators for sustainable and environmental-friendly ship schedule design

Abstract

Oceangoing ships transport a significant amount of different goods across the globe. The seaborne trade is expected to continue its growth despite the COVID-19 pandemic. The International Maritime Organization considers the amount of emissions produced by oceangoing ships as substantial. Shipping lines have to explore innovative and effective alternatives to meet challenging emission reduction targets. This study proposes a new type of collaborative agreements amongst shipping lines and marine terminal operators, where the shipping line is not only able to select the marine terminal for the ship service at every port of the shipping route but also request the appropriate arrival time window and handling rate. A multi-objective mathematical model is developed to capture the proposed collaborative agreements. The first objective of the model minimizes the cost components that are mostly driven by the economic perspectives, while the second one directly captures the environmental perspectives as well. A novel customized exact multi-objective optimization method, inspired by the ε-constraint method and the goal programming method, is developed to address the problem. The computational experiments are conducted for the Europe Pakistan India Consortium 2 (EPIC-2) shipping route. The results show that the developed solution method is able to generate the Pareto Fronts with sufficient solution density. The experiments also demonstrate that the proposed multi-objective mathematical model could facilitate the analysis of trade-offs amongst the economic and environmental perspectives in the ship schedule design. Furthermore, the importance of effective collaborative agreements amongst shipping lines and marine terminal operators is showcased as well.