Container Liner Shipping Research Articles

Toward green container liner shipping: joint optimization of heterogeneous fleet deployment, speed optimization, and fuel bunkering

AbstractContainer liner shipping companies, under the international shipping carbon reduction indicators proposed by the International Maritime Organization, must transform two key aspects: technology and operations. This paper defines a green liner shipping problem (GLSP) that integrates the deployment of a heterogeneous fleet, speed determination, and fuel bunkering. The objective is to achieve low‐carbon operations in liner shipping, taking into consideration the diversification of power systems, the use of alternative fuels in ships, and the continuous improvement of alternative fuel bunkering systems. For this purpose, we present a bi‐objective mixed integer nonlinear programming model and develop two methodologies: an epsilon‐constraint approach and a heuristic‐based multi‐objective genetic algorithm. We validate the effectiveness of our model and methods through a case study involving container ships of various sizes deployed on intra‐Asian short sea routes by SITC International Holdings Co., Ltd. The experimental results highlight the crucial role of dual‐fuel (DF) ships in the pursuit of low‐carbon strategies by liner companies, with liquefied natural gas and ammonia DF ships being the most widely used. Additionally, fuel cell (FC) ships, particularly those powered by ammonia and hydrogen, demonstrate significant carbon reduction potential. Furthermore, ships with larger container capacities have a greater cost advantage. For the GLSP, speed determination is an auxiliary decision, and the lowest speed is not necessarily the optimal choice. Decision‐makers must carefully balance competing economic and carbon emission reduction objectives, as deploying more alternative fuel ships may increase fuel bunkering and fuel consumption, resulting in a higher total operating cost.

Analysis of the Liner Shipping Network Structure of the Asia–Europe Main Trunk Route Using Social Network Analysis

Due to COVID-19, the shipping market has faced uncertainty, and the possibility of changes in port routes has increased. The purpose of this study was to analyze the network of container liner shipping routes between Asia and Europe. In particular, this research focused on a global risky situation—the COVID-19 pandemic. The data examined encompassed Asia–Europe route schedules from January 2018 to October 2021, which exhibited significant fluctuations due to the COVID-19 pandemic originating in 2019. To access this problem, utilizing concepts of centrality from social network analysis (SNA), namely degree centrality and betweenness centrality, this analysis incorporated route capacity as a weighted factor. The findings revealed that the port of Rotterdam held the highest degree of centrality in 2018, 2019, and 2021, while Shanghai claimed the highest degree of centrality in 2020. Singapore exhibited the highest betweenness centrality. Asian ports wielded greater influence during the COVID-19 pandemic compared to European ports. Furthermore, Singapore emerged as a pivotal mediator in the Asia–Europe routes, playing a significant role within the global supply chain. Results showed that the port could be put into an unstable situation. Therefore, the managers of port and shipping companies should be ready to minimize risk. From an academic perspective, it is difficult to integrate and analyze container liner schedules as they are monthly updated. This study therefore analyzed continuous schedules to examine dynamic changes in schedules. By adopting SNA, we presented changes in connectivity over multiple periods. This study addressed questions stakeholders may have had about route changes during the global crisis, contributing to sustainable container transportation. This study provides a general understanding of Asia–Europe container scheduling for decision makers. Using market schedules, this research analyzed the connections, and evaluated and compared each port.

International Practice of Liner Container Shipping Regulation in the Transport System

Effective regulatory and legal framework in this field has several positive advantages for the transportation participants. A significant place in the article is given to ensuring the principle of “common carrier” for access of a wide range of consumers to the container carriers service. In connection with the transformation both of supply chains and logistics flows under conditions of new foreign economic factors along with the emergence of new shipping lines on the Russian container market the relevance of this topic will continue to increase.Aim. To consider the aspects of normative and legal regulation of liner container shipping in the USA, EU, PRC and the Russian Federation.Tasks. To analyze the strategies of shipping lines on the Russian and global markets, to identify key regulatory legal acts of foreign countries in the sphere of liner container shipping, to identify the features of the Russian legislation in this sphere and the ways of its development.Methods. Regulatory legal acts of the USA, EU, PRC and the Russian Federation were collected, which play an extremely important role in the development of international container transportation and increasing the competitiveness of foreign economic activity.Results. The research of relevant legal frameworks and instruments of state regulation of sea container lines activity to ensure non-discriminatory access of consumers of transportation services, public availability of information about liner container services, high quality of transportation services for foreign economic relations was carried out.Conclusions. In modern foreign economic conditions, alliances and various forms of carrier cooperation are the subject of state regulation of liner container shipping in order to protect competition on the market. The legislation of the USA and the Russian Federation establishes compulsory publication of shipping line tariffs, while according to the provisions of the PRC legislation shipping lines provide their tariffs to the freight exchange, which is authorized by the competent state body. In addition, international experience shows that sea lines “Common carriers” are subject to a number of other requirements. In the Russian Federation, sea container transportation is carried out by both liner and tramp vessels due to the fact that the certain carriers are not registered as shipping line operators and information about some regular container services is limited.

A two-step approach for deploying heterogeneous vessels and designing reliable schedule in liner shipping services

Schedule reliability is a crucial metric for measuring liner container shipping service. Due to the inherent uncertainties at sea and ports, schedule delays and unreliable on-time performance have long plagued shipping companies. In practice, the heterogeneity of container vessels also creates challenges for deployment and schedule optimization. To address the problem, we develop a two-step approach with two programming sub-models. In the first step, we tackle the challenges of ship deployment and scheduling by considering heterogeneous vessels and capturing the interarrival time between adjacent ports of call. In the second step, we use the conditional value-at-risk (CVaR) to address the uncertainty risk avoidance in schedule design. To solve the stochastic programming models, we employ a solution framework based on the outer linear approximation method and the risk measure method, where CVaR is specified as the risk measure. We illustrate the application of our model on a case study concerning a real route operated by COSCO Shipping Lines. The results show that the total cost of liner shipping service with heterogeneous fleet on the route can be reduce by 4.77% compared with homogeneous fleet. And the cost of risk with the reliable schedule can be decreased by 8.04% compared with the ideal schedule. The research conclusions can provide some useful decision-making references for shipping companies to deploy heterogeneous vessels and design reliable schedules.

A Conceptual Approach to Personnel Activity Management in a Company Operating as an Agent for a Container Shipping Line

A Conceptual Approach to Personnel Activity Management in a Company Operating as an Agent for a Container Shipping Line

Dynamic container slot allocation for a liner shipping service

In this paper, we study a dynamic container slot allocation problem (DCSAP) for a liner container shipping company that aims to make an acceptance or rejection decision to each dynamically arriving container slot booking request. To capture the dynamic arrival feature and real-time acceptance/rejection decision of the booking request, we formulate the DCSAP as a dynamic programming (DP) model with the objective of maximizing the total revenues generated by accepted container booking requests over the entire booking horizon. Due to the well-known curse of dimensionality of solving a DP model, we develop a series of models to transform the intractable DP model into a solvable approximate linear programming (ALP) model. We further propose a spatiotemporal-heterogeneity-based (STH-based) decomposition preprocessor by identifying the spatiotemporal property of the DCSAP before solving the ALP model. Extensive numerical experiments are conducted to assess the applicability of the developed research methodology.

Liner shipping network design model with carbon tax, seasonal freight rate fluctuations and empty container relocation

In response to the challenges posed by the shipping carbon tax resulting from the low-carbon environmental policy, the seasonal fluctuation of freight rates in the container liner shipping market, and the reduced flexibility in fleet adjustment, we develop a bi-level programming model to maximize the average revenue per container ship and the total revenue of the fleet.The upper-level model selects the optimal shipping networks for both the off-season and peak season, while also designing the liner fleet for these two networks. The lower-level model optimizes the slot allocation scheme and the empty container storage and transportation scheme to evaluate the revenue of the network calculated by the upper-level model. Three meta-heuristic algorithms are proposed. We take the China-West Europe liner shipping route as the research object, and conduct numerical experiments on different optimization objectives and liner types. Results demonstrate that maximizing the average revenue per container ship involves reducing the carbon tax cost, simplifying the trunk route structure, and increasing the number of feeder routes. These changes lead to reduced satisfaction rates for transportation demands in both China and Europe. If the company seeks to maximize total revenue, they may achieve the opposite result. Therefore, liner companies should reasonably set optimization goals, adjust the network structure and liner operation status in a timely manner, and scientifically allocate container ship and empty containers to achieve the operational goals of reducing carbon emissions and maximizing revenue to cope with the volatile market and the low-carbon regulations.

Dynamic pricing and competition of container liner shipping services in a duopoly spot market

With the application of online booking technology in the spot market of container liner shipping, dynamic pricing is considered an important tool and development trend to balance container shipping supply and demand from the spot market. This study examines the dynamic pricing and competition of container liner shipping services in a duopoly spot market where two shipping companies compete on liner routes with multiple overlapping origin–destination (O-D) pairs. The demand within the spot market for one shipping company is sensitive to both the freight rate set by the shipping company and its competitor. To tackle this complex challange, a non-linear mixed-integer generalized Nash equilibrium optimization model was formulated for the dynamic pricing and competition problem to maximize the profits of both shipping companies. To effectively reach the optimal solution for the dynamic pricing and competition problem, the proposed model is reformulated as a linear complementary problem with a Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) conditional system. An optimal response decomposition algorithm is developed to obtain the global optimal solution of the model. Numerical experiments with the Trans-Pacifc shipping network of two oligarchic shipping companies were conducted to demonstrate the efficiency of the solution algorithm and the applicability of the proposed model in improving the two companies’ profits from the spot market.

Pricing of Contractual Shipments and Slot Allocation in Container Liner Shipping under Stochastic Environment

Pricing of Contractual Shipments and Slot Allocation in Container Liner Shipping under Stochastic Environment

Socio-economic impacts of shipping along the Northwest Passage: The cost to locals

This paper presents a novel approach to assessing the cost of container liner shipping through the Northwest Passage (NWP) on northern local communities. Based on some representative communities, concerns of the residents of these Canadian Arctic regions were assessed. Two essential factors to the well-being of the community members—air pollution and oil spills—are considered in our model. The approach was therefore used to evaluate the socio-economic impact of Arctic container liner shipping in Canadian Arctic regions. More specifically, the approach adopted a) uses a logit model to estimate the market share of NWP for commercial liner shipping; b) investigates different scenarios to evaluate the feasibility of commercial liner shipping through the NWP; c) incorporating concerns from the local communities, conducts a socio-economic analysis for the communities. With the analysis of the socio-economic impacts on local communities, the study would help guide governments on how to evaluate and calculate transit fees for transiting NWP. The study is imperative in supporting decision-making to shape Arctic policy. Furthermore, it gives stakeholders an idea of the market dynamics of shipping in the Arctic area.

Retrofit-induced changes in the radiated noise and monopole source levels of container ships.

The container shipping line Maersk undertook a Radical Retrofit to improve the energy efficiency of twelve sister container ships. Noise reduction, identified as a potential added benefit of the retrofitting effort, was investigated in this study. A passive acoustic recording dataset from the Santa Barbara Channel off Southern California was used to compile over 100 opportunistic vessel transits of the twelve G-Class container ships, pre- and post-retrofit. Post-retrofit, the G-Class vessels' capacity was increased from ~9,000 twenty-foot equivalent units (TEUs) to ~11,000 TEUs, which required a draft increase of the vessel by 1.5 m on average. The increased vessel draft resulted in higher radiated noise levels (<2 dB) in the mid- and high-frequency bands. Accounting for the Lloyd's mirror (dipole source) effect, the monopole source levels of the post-retrofit ships were found to be significantly lower (>5 dB) than the pre-retrofit ships in the low-frequency band and the reduction was greatest at low speed. Although multiple design changes occurred during retrofitting, the reduction in the low-frequency band most likely results from a reduction in cavitation due to changes in propeller and bow design.

Container liner shipping schedule optimization with shipper selection behavior considered

ABSTRACT The liner shipping schedules determine the container transportation time and the arrival time of ships, which has a significant influence on the shipper selection behavior and the transportation demand. This paper addresses the container liner shipping schedule optimization with shipper selection behavior considered. Our problem is formulated as a mixed-integer nonlinear programming model, where the shipper selection behavior is evaluated by a nested logit model. A particle swarm optimization (PSO) framework embedded with CPLEX solver is designed, by combining the constraint relaxations and the linearization techniques with the heuristic rules. The numerical experiments are conducted based on the Persian Gulf route of COSCO SHIPPING LINES. The results show that: the total freight demand is increased by 23% and the weekly operation revenue is increased by 31% after considering shipper selection. Besides, we find that the planned ship speed should be increased for time-preference shippers with electronic or refrigerated products, while it should be decreased for price-preference shippers with general or bulk cargoes. These conclusions can provide decision support for the operation practice of liner shipping schedule design.

System Reliability Analysis for a Stochastic Liner Container Shipping Service with Stochastic Terminals

In the container shipping industry, a company could have an advantage over its competitors while its liner container shipping system (LCSS) can successfully transport the requested demand. However, some uncertainties such as unstable sea state, terrible weather, sailor’s negligence, and the condition of vessels would affect the number of slots on the vessel to place containers when shipping on different legs. Thus, that number should be regarded as stochastic. At the container terminal, containers are loaded from and unloaded to the vessel ship by the quay cranes. The number of available quay cranes at each terminal is also stochastic because of the reservation of other competitors. Therefore, this study proposes an algorithm that constructs an LCSS as a stochastic liner container shipping network (SLCSN) model to analyze the network reliability. Network reliability is defined as the probability that all vessels in the SLCSN can satisfy the demands within the time threshold. For an executive of the liner container shipping company, the network reliability can be utilized as the performance indicator to make an appropriate managerial decision.

A Joint Optimization of Vessel Scheduling and Refueling Strategy for Container Liner Shipping with Cooperative Agreements

A Joint Optimization of Vessel Scheduling and Refueling Strategy for Container Liner Shipping with Cooperative Agreements

A risk-averse approach for joint contract selection and slot allocation in liner container shipping

Liner shipping companies need to satisfy the shipping demand from both the long-term contracts and the spot market. In general, the container shipping demand of the long-term contract has more stable volumes but lower freight rates compared with the spot market demand. It is thus a critical problem for the shipping companies how to provide discriminative shipping services to these two types of shipping demand through contract selection and container slot allocation to simultaneously increase the shipping profit and control its variations resulting from the demand variations. To handle this problem, a two-stage stochastic programming model is constructed in this paper which adopts the Conditional-Value-at-Risk (CVaR) to measure the profit variations. In the first stage, the shipping company selects the long-term contracts from a candidate contract set to sign with customers under the uncertainties in the show-up rates of containers in long-term contracts, and the volumes and the freight rates of the spot market demands. In the second stage, after all uncertainties have been realized, the shipping company determines the slot allocation for both the contract and spot demands. With the introduction of the CVaR, classical Benders decomposition cannot be directly applied to solve the risk-averse model. This paper thus develops a risk-averse Benders decomposition method tailored for the model. Numerical experiments are also conducted to verify the effectiveness of the solution method and provide some meaningful managerial insights.

Dynamic recovery actions in multi-objective liner shipping service with buffer times

This paper investigates the dynamic recovery policies for liner shipping services with the consideration of buffer time allocation and uncertainties. The aim of this study was to allocate the buffer time at the tactical level and then determine optimal options of actions, including speed optimisation strategy, port skipping and acceleration rate choice, for recovering from disruptions due to various uncertainties or random adverse events, which cause vessel delays. To achieve this, an attempt was made to obtain the optimal balance among economic, environmental and service reliability objectives. A novel mathematical formulation is introduced to solve the robust vessel scheduling problem with short- and long-term decisions. Furthermore, two heuristics were tested to solve the proposed model. Experiments on a container liner shipping service showed the validity of the model and a set of managerial insights were gained from them.

The Impact of Epidemic on the Trans-Pacific Container Liner Shipping Market: A Game of the Supply and Demand

Since January 2020, the global novel coronavirus epidemic (referred to as the epidemic) has raged. Countries around the world have &amp;quot;suspended&amp;quot; most economic activities in order to prevent the spread of the epidemic. As a result, the global supply chain is severely disrupted, causing global inflation to rise. Freight rates on the trans-Pacific route from North America to the Asia-Pacific region continued to skyrocket, surcharge items increased, and delivery events were extended. Based on the analysis of the current situation of the impact on the trans-Pacific supply chain, the paper uses the data of the growth rate of Sino-US trade volume as a &amp;quot;pay off&amp;quot; sample to establish a supply-demand game model for container liners on the trans-Pacific route under the background of the epidemic. Under the dynamic assumption of incomplete information, a Bayesian refined Nash equilibrium is obtained. Finally, the paper uses the Bayesian refined Nash equilibrium model to analyze the trend of container liner shipping rates on trans-Pacific routes under the background of the epidemic.

Vessel Scheduling and Bunker Management With Speed Deviations for Liner Shipping in the Presence of Collaborative Agreements

Vessels face uncertain factors during a voyage, such as bad weather and harsh sea conditions along a route in container liner shipping. As such, the real vessel speed during each leg of a voyage often deviates from the planned one, which may lead to fluctuations in vessel schedule and bunker consumption. This paper investigates the problem of vessel scheduling and bunker management with speed deviations (VSBMSD) for liner shipping in the presence of collaborative agreements. By establishing the worst-case scenario of the maximum bunker consumption function with vessel sailing speed as an independent variable, we develop a mixed-integer nonlinear programming model to minimize the total liner shipping route service cost. A piecewise linear secant approximation method is designed, and then a CPLEX solver is used to solve the problem. The results of the computational experiments conducted for the AEMX route indicate that VSBMSD in the presence of collaborative agreements can enable shipping companies to design vessel schedules reasonably and reduce the total cost of liner shipping route service by at least 2.95% compared to the results from similar studies.

Dynamic Pricing and Competition of Container Liner Shipping Services in a Duopoly Spot Market

Dynamic Pricing and Competition of Container Liner Shipping Services in a Duopoly Spot Market

Schedule reliability in liner shipping timetable design: A convex programming approach

Container liner shipping is the primary mode of moving manufactured products across continents. Partly due to inherent uncertainties at sea and ports, the liner shipping industry has long had a notorious reputation of schedule delays and unreliable on-time performance. This paper formulates a new approach to incorporate schedule reliability targets in liner shipping timetable design, to balance bunker consumption, time taken for the voyage, and schedule delays. We first model a surrogate problem using a copositive program through a moment decomposition approach and solve it as a convex semidefinite programming relaxation. We next incorporate schedule reliability targets implicitly by exploiting the optimality condition of this surrogate model.We use this approach to analyze the trade-offs between the bunker consumption and the schedule reliability targets for each port call. Furthermore, we derive the optimal speed of the vessel in each leg of the schedule to control for total bunker consumption. Surprisingly, the analytical analysis shows that, if a shipping line has the freedom to choose its preferred berthing times at all ports, it is optimal to set design sailing speeds equal at all legs to maximize schedule reliability.We validate our model using data from a Daily Maersk service, and demonstrate that our schedule can achieve an even higher schedule reliability than the innovative Daily Maersk service schedule, which attained more than 98% reliability in practice, with 11.4% lower bunker consumption. In comparison with a common schedule design heuristic, our model can design service schedules that improve the reliability performance by at least five percentage points, consuming the same amount of bunker. For the same reliability target (of 80%) in schedule design, our model can help reduce bunker consumption by about 11.6% for an 11-week schedule. The savings in bunker consumption can be much more substantial when an ocean carrier aims for higher schedule reliability.