Route Stowage Planning Decision For Inland Container Liner Shipping

Inland container liner shipping connects domestic and foreign markets and plays an important role in trade for inland cities.In China,the total economic output of the Yangtze River Economic Belt in 2017 had exceeded 40% of the country as a whole.The fast development of urban economies in the Yangtze River Economic Belt has enabled the rapid development of container transport along the Yangtze River.In inland container liner shipping,the navigation safety of ship and operational efficiency of port are directly related to the route stowage plan.The effective route stowage planning decision could greatly guarantee the interests of ship and ports.Current research on the stowage planning problem typically focuses on maritime container shipping.The inland container liner shipping has its peculiarities at the market background,transport ship type and port collection process.These peculiarities make the existing stowage planning methods about maritime container shipping cannot be directly adapted to its stowage planning.It is necessary to study the decision-making methods for meeting the actual stowage planning demand of inland container liner shipping considering its unique peculiarities.The existing stowage planning for inland container ships remains at the level of single-port planning and relies on human experience.This may easily bring the re-handles at ports and hardly meet the practical requirements of stowage planning for inland container liner shipping.This research consider the inland container liner shipping of the Yangtze River to study the mathematical formulation methods and optimization algorithms for making the inland container liner route stowage planning decision.The main research work of this subject includes the following aspects:(1)Inland container liner route stowage planning problem.With the container liner shipping of the Yangtze River,the characteristics of the inland container liner route stowage planning problem have been extracted including the bin-packing,multi-stage and dynamic considering the ship's structure,route transportation and collection process at ports.Then the problem has been divided into some sub-problems based on these characteristics,i.e.single port stowage planning problem,static route stowage planning problem and dynamic route stowage planning problem.(2)General algorithm framework for inland container liner route stowage planning.The heuristics could find the satisfactory solutions for the stowage planning problems of the container ship.A general heuristic algorithm framework has been proposed which including a construction part and an improving part.The construction part could construct the initial stowage plan and then the improving part improves the plan to get the satisfactory solution.(3)The single port stowage planning problem for inland container liner shipping.The two-stage method has been adopted to divide the problem into two sub-problems,i.e.the master bay planning problem(MBPP)and the slot planning problem(SPP).Considering their characteristics of 3D bin-packing,the greedy randomized adaptive search procedure(GRASP)and heuristic evolutionary strategy(HES)have been designed based on the general algorithm framework for solving MBPP and SPP respectively.(4)The static route stowage planning problem for inland container liner shipping.The multi-stage hierarchical decomposition approach has been applied to divide the problem into the multi-port master bay planning problem(MP-MBPP)and SPP.GRASP has been adapted for solving MP-MBPP to simultaneously generate the master bay plans for multiple ports.Then with the master bay plans as input,SPP has been optimized by HES to make the stowage plans for the ports of the route.Meanwhile,HES has been modified by the grey correlation analysis and grey entropy parallel analysis method for the multi-objective optimization of the static route stowage planning problem.(5)The dynamic route stowage planning problem for inland container liner shipping.The stochastic programming,robust optimization and hybrid neighborhood search(HNS)algorithm based on the general algorithm framework have been presented to generate the robust stowage plan for the route stowage planning problem with weight uncertainties of the domestic trade containers.The multi-stage rolling scheduling approach and matheuristic algorithm(MA)based on the general algorithm framework have been adopted to generate the stowage plan for the route stowage planning problem with quantity uncertainties of the foreign trade containers.