Liner Single Allocation Hub-and-Spoke Network Design

With the advancement of trade globalization process,liner shipment has accounted for a growing share of all the modes of transportation.and the forms of liner shipment network are more and more diverse and scientific,the right structure of network can have a good adaption to the whole development and make the benefit of liner maximize.In particular,the hub-and-spoke network structure has some advantages that it can integrate transportation resources well,improve service frequency and reduce transportation costs.Therefore,more and more liner companies choose hub-and-spoke network to plan their own operation network in recent years.Due to the variety of liner hub-and-spoke network,this paper chooses a single allocation hub-and-spoke network as the research object.When we design the network,we should primarily take into account the following four factors:?the high operation cost brought by the large-scale container ship;?the source of the container cargo;?the impact of the hub port on the whole network;?the impact of empty container repositioning on the overall liner shipment network operating costs.However,with the continuous improvement of the level of shipbuilding technology,in one hand,the carrying capacity of container ships continue to refresh;in the other hand,capacity appears idle.In addition,the global trade flow appears serious imbalance,especially from China to USA and from China to Europe.As a result,a large number of empty containers appear in Europe and the United States.How to reposition reasonable number of the idle empty containers from the abundant areas to the regions of lacking empty containers is a big problem,it can't be ignored by the liner company.Therefore,having a full consideration of these factors is critical to have a more rational and scientific liner single allocation hub-and-spoke network design.In this paper,these following four basic contents are mainly focused on:?how to select hub ports and feeder ports in the alternative ports;?how to arrange suitable number and type of ships between ports;? how to have a reasonable number of full containers transshipment from the beginning original ports to destination ports;?how to reposition a reasonable number of empty containers.In this paper,we consider the cost of repositioning empty container and the time cost of berthing at port especially,and make the hub port as the decision variable,and make a minimize objective function based on the sum of ship operation cost,full container transportation and transshipment cost,empty container repositioning cost and time cost of ship's berthing in the port.A non-linear mixed integer programming model is proposed to solve the problem of hub port selection,full container transshipment,ship deployment of ship routing and empty container reposition.The model is solved by AMPL software.Finally,a case study is carried out on 11 ports distributing in the southeast coast of China and on the east coast of USA.And the sensitivity analysis that proves the feasibility of the model is also verified,it showes that the character of hub port will change along with factors related to the variation of port number.