The Optimization Study Of Feeder Line Containership Real-time Routes Schedule

Under the influence of global economic, maritime transportation as the main pattern of the world trade transportation has developed rapidly. At the same time, the container transportation as an importation part of the modern transportation means has attracted more attention for its own advantage. With the improvement of technology, the scale of container ship has been larger and larger to pursue scale benefits. However, large-scale container ships can only call for the deep ports, feeder transportation as the tasks supply for the main line has gained more and more attention. In the hub-and-spoke transportation model, it needs small and medium size ships to finish the feeder line tasks; these ships can fulfill the tasks between hub ports and feeder ports well. Main line transportation has been mature; however, feeder line transportation’s operating environment is complex and its commodity resource is unstable, shipping enterprises meet lots of difficulties when designing routes. How to allocate ships reasonably, design routes, obtain the maximum economic benefits and win the competition are the main problems for shipping enterprises to solve.This paper analyses the operating environment and characteristics of feeder line transportation, makes a reasonable classification for feeder line transportation real time dynamic events and offers feasible solution strategies.Then this paper builds static and real time dynamic mixed integer programming models for the multiple types of containership in the spoke network and finds the solutions for these two models by using genetic algorithms and rolling planning algorithms.At the last, an example is necessary to verify the feasibility of the models and algorithms.Example results show that shipping enterprises can design feasible routes and dispose the suitable containership type. In real time dynamic route scheduling, shipping enterprises save the manpower, material resources and operating costs by adjusting the routes. In sum, when dealing with the spoke network transportation problems, the models and algorithms given by this paper can provide powerful theoretical supports for shipping enterprises.