Research On Dry Bulk Fleet Stochastic Programming Model Concerning Ship’s Lateral Cargo Mobility

The current shipping market is still not out of the poor state with excess capacity and frequent market fluctuations, shipping companies are faced with enormous pressure in running the business. In order to respond to market challenges better, scientific, accurate and timely fleet plan is essential.Although the researches on fleet planning have been under way for decades, but most studies can only solve problems under certain assumptions, the results are still some distance from the actual application. Based on the theory and related researches on fleet plan, this paper studies ship-type selection of fleet planning further, takes the uncertainty in the shipping market into account and builds a fleet stochastic plan model for dry bulk carriers fleets. The model considers the ship sale & purchase, lease and laid-up plan during the planning periods and use stochastic programming to cope with the dry bulk shipping market’s uncertainty with the target function to maximize net present value of the fleet’s total revenue. The paper seeks the optimal ships routing scheme and the annual optimal development strategy by using Lingo.Using Company S engaged in dry bulk shipping as an example, this model plans its fleet’s development in the next 4 years. The results show that stochastic programming can make the model more realistic and better-adapted. And when the market’s volatility is very large, taking the ship’s lateral cargo mobility into consideration when make a fleet plan can increases fleet’s ability to respond to risks and improves fleet management flexibility and help the company increase the profits.