Container Ship Scheduling On The Truck Line Of Yangtze River With Transit Operation

The thriving development of shipping industry on Yangtze River attracts numerous inputs of container ships,however,excessive inputs makes the supply is much more than demand and thus competitions among container transportation companies are extremely fierce.Choosing ships with appropriate tonnage is very important for shipping company to cut cost and improve competitiveness.The shipping companies running the business of container transportation in the trunk line of the Yangtze River have a certain amount to ships.How to use these resources reasonably to meet the demand is the pursuit for all the ship company.Comparing with ocean transportation,the water transportation on Yangtze River has some features on waterway,ship and cargoes.The Truck Line of Yangtze River is linear and the ports on the line are distributed on this line.The capacities of ships used for the The Truck Line of Yangtze River are comparatively small.The container cargoes are in small volume and multiple batches.Therefore,the transit operation has good advantages on the ship transportation of The Truck Line of Yangtze River.Transit operation is to transit cargo from the former ship to another ship,which match the volume of the cargo better,to increase utilization of ship and decrease total operation cost.In addition,the development of transit equipment and charging rule,the transit operation is to be used in a wide way.In the case of permitting transit operation,this paper considers the ship-scheduling problem with objective of minimizing total transportation cost,taking into account the ship allocation,port selection and freight assignment simultaneously.Then,an integer-programming model is proposed and genetic algorithm is used to solve the model.Next,numerical experiments are carried out to test the availability of the proposed method.The optimal results are compared with those do not permit transit operation and the results show,optimal ship scheduling plan that allows for transit operation contributes to the development of shipping company,by increasing ship utilization and decreasing transportation cost.The mode provides decision support for shipping company when shipping scheduling plan is to be made.YWhat's more,the cost advantage of transit operation is more significant in cargoes that are in small volume and multiple batches,which is in accordance with the feature of container shipping of the Truck Line of Yangtze River.