An Model For Container Marine Transport System On Robust Optimization

The advantage of the container Hub-and-Spoke marine transport network is to reduce the cost of each container and maximize the economies of scale, which advances the developments of the mega-containerships and the deep-water container ports objectively.In order to achieve the maximum profit and the minimum total cost of container transportation, the liner companies will face a lot of long-term strategic decision-making issues including a reasonable choice of hub ports, an optimized container transport route, and a stable container marine transport network.Due to the world financial crisis and the recession of world trade, shipping is the first to suffer from the shrinking and the liner companies are facing daunting challenges, such as accumulation of a large number of empty containers and idle capacity of container transportation.Therefore, a scientific and rational way how to establish a stable container marine transport network and minimize the trade risk is the most important issue the liner company should solve currently.The optimization of container transport network is a typical NP-C problem, most previous studies are conducted on the basis of certainty.However, the container transport market is always subjected to various uncertain factors, such as demand and cost uncertainties; changes of world's politics, economy and trade environment; natural disasters; new ports constructions, etc.These factors often bring great effects to the liner companies in organizing production.In order to reduce the influence of the risks brought by these uncertainties, it is necessary to use a reasonable optimization method for container marine transport network, to increase the system robustness.Robust optimization has been remarkable by many researchers as a new approach for dealing with uncertain optimization problems, and is widely used in production scheduling, logistics planning and intelligent transportation system studies in recent years.It is a new attempt for this paper to study on the container marine transport network using of robust optimization methods.This paper is composed based on conclusion of the latest research advances of robust optimization.Firstly, we analyse the economic mechanisms of the hub-spoke network from the economies of scale and economies of scope.Secondly, focusing on the minimum total cost of container transportation, this paper establishes robust optimization models of the hub-spoke network, in the case of the hub port selection with the uncertainty.Finally, the paper chooses fifteen certain representative ports as the nodes of network, and uses the improved Max-Min ant system to solve the models.This paper concludes that the robust optimization methods can be efficiently applied on optimizing the container marine transport network, and the results are with better robustness, which can make good reference in choosing hub ports and arranging container transport routes and ships for liner companies.