Community Structure Based Global Hub Location Problem In Liner Shipping

These years,the world economy has been upswing,the world trade volumes grows as well.Being an important transportation mode,container liner shipping is recovering from the trough.In the area of liner shipping study,liner shipping network design and hub port location is a popular topic.Practically,liner shipping companies tend to provide container shipping service for customers all over the world.Most existing studies on liner shipping network design and hub location problem mainly consider a region or a subnetwork of global shipping network,so they can only get a local optimization hub location solution.From the perspective of liner shipping company,this paper investigates the community structure based global hub location problem(GHLP),through which a global optimization hub location solution can be obtained.In this way,the liner shipping company can lower its cost and gain higher profit.First,this paper reviews the current research status of container liner shipping and hub port location.The paper then introduces the general situation of container liner shipping,some classical hub location problems,and basic facts about community structure.Following two chapters are the core content.In the third chapter,the global hub port location problem together with several assumptions made is stated.Chapter 4 proposes the two-stage optimization method targeting on the GHLP.Besides,analysis of theoretical on the hub port location of various communities and the performance of our hub location solution for each considered community are carried out.In the fifth chapter,this paper conducts multiple numerical experiments on the base of a series of data provided by a liner shipping company.All the results account for the effectiveness of our GHLP and two-stage optimization method.The effect of variables and scenarios is also analyzed.For one thing,this research can provide some reference for hub port location for liner shipping companies.For another,the application of community structure may give a new approach for solving large scale hub location problems.