Planning Liner Shipping Routes And Schedules Under Weather And Ocean Conditions Uncertainty

To seize the opportunity of commercial development of liner ships operations brought by the opening of the Northern Sea Route(NSR),and to improve the resistance ability of the liner shipping companies to the risk of late-arrival penalty and increased operation costs caused by the unpredictability of weather and ocean conditions,the route and schedule of liner ships should be prudently planned.This thesis described a singleship liner routing and scheduling problem considering elastic demand and late-arrival penalty.It first presents a deterministic model,aiming to maximize the revenue,with the decrease in shipping demand when extending the schedule to avoid the risk of late-arrival penalty taken into account.Based on the deterministic model,for two types of uncertainty sets,bounded and budget-bounded uncertainty sets,their corresponding robust counterparts are derived.A case study,set in the NSR with several critical ports along the route chosen as the candidate ports,is performed,and the results reveal: the deterministic model and bounded robust model can be seen as special cases of the budget-bounded robust model when the uncertainty budget is set to null or full,respectively;under uncertain weather and ocean conditions,it tends to extend the schedule to avoid penalty;the conservativeness of the solutions can be adjusted by the uncertainty budget;the uncertainty budget at the last port determines the overall uncertainty while the uncertainty budget at each port influences the actual uncertainties of the following ports;when setting the uncertainty budget,the closer a port is to the original port,the more individual uncertainty budget should be given to that port so that the overall robustness of the whole system can be enhanced.