Fleet Planning With Uncertain Demand Based On Regret Strategy

Shipping industry has a long history, as well as the characteristics of the internationalization. For a long time many factors influence the changes of shipping market development, such as the world economy, politics. In recent decades, due to the prosperity and development of the world economy and international trade, international shipping industry has gained unprecedented development. International shipping has reacted to the world economic development at the same time, and has played an important role in the world economic integration and globalization of international trade. It also becomes one of the most important basic industries of national development. No matter how the economic develops, each country has a deep understanding of the importance of the shipping development. Therefore, governments have stepped up investment of shipping industry, leading the world’s merchant fleet size increasing sharply.It was the financial crisis began in 2008 causing quite a big hit in the shipping market. The problem of excess capacity, which was caused by the excessive growth of the world’s merchant fleet, became much more serious in the case of the apparent downstream of the demand. The part of the merchant fleet will be facing the fate of slowdown or suspension. It is also a big challenge for the shipping companies. So it is of great significance for shipping companies to control the costs and reduce risk when considering the fleet planning.But the shipping demand is not fluctuated in the future demand. And a prediction method is difficult to work out the predictions suit for the future change. It is easy to cause an error for planning using only one prediction method. A ship has high value in itself, and it is a long-term decision to do fleet planning. An error may cause great economic loss to the company. Through a variety of forecasting methods to predict the results to get the set, a model was established based on mini-max regret strategy, and a relatively robust planning scheme is got by solution. It can effectively avoid the fleet planning risk caused by the uncertain demand in the future. And a numerical example is used to verify that it is reasonable.