Research On Feeder Vessels Scheduling Problem Under Speed Optimization

With the rising around the world shipping center, container ships develop toward the large-scale, but large container ships can only anchor trunk hub port of deep-water, and feeder line transportation as a bridge of hub port and feeder port, played a transit, distribution and sparse trunk cargo, thus forming a sea hub-and-spoke transport model. Visibly, container feeder transport is the inevitable result of the development of international container transport. Ship scheduling is an important aspect of optimal allocation of resources of a ship container feeder transport, and in its decision-making involved in, speed optimization is the key to determine the variable costs of shipping and ship utilization directly. Feeder line channel environment is complex and has no stable provision, so shipping companies may face many difficulties when they make ship scheduling, and therefore carry a ship speed optimization scheduling to design feeder container ship transport route for shipping companies in reason can save costs, save energy and protect the environment.Based on inducting and analyzing the research of speed optimization, scheduling and ship container feeder line transport systematically, found that the current lack of consideration of speed optimized for multi-feeder port container feeder vessels ship scheduling, both container transport, and there are container ships distributed multi-ship, multi-speed route scheduling optimization problem not studied in depth. For a feeder line transportation system for different ship types, different speed, container handling determined volume and time constraints, this paper establishes mixed-integer nonlinear programming model with the lowest total cost of shipping as the goal. And this study designs encoding and decoding solution suitable to improve the traditional genetic algorithm to solve the model. Then, the Pearl River Delta of a shipping enterprise’s feeder line transport as an example verifies the practicability of the model. Finally, this paper makes a sensitivity analysis for the capacity of the ship, ship speed, time constraints, container loading and unloading containers.The results showed that the model in this paper can help shipping companies design routes well, and configure the appropriate ship type and speed. Integrated the number of containers, the time limit, speed and other factor to make decision in the ship scheduling, which can provide decision support for the shipping companies.