Publication Type
Journal Article
Version
submittedVersion
Publication Date
1-2022
Abstract
Container liner shipping is the primary mode of moving manufactured products across continents. Partly due to inherent uncertainties at sea and ports, the liner shipping industry has long had a notorious reputation of schedule delays and unreliable on-time performance. This paper formulates a new approach to incorporate schedule reliability targets in liner shipping timetable design, to balance bunker consumption, time taken for the voyage, and schedule delays. We first model a surrogate problem using a copositive program through a moment decomposition approach and solve it as a convex semidefinite programming relaxation. We next incorporate schedule reliability targets implicitly by exploiting the optimality condition of this surrogate model.We use this approach to analyze the trade-offs between the bunker consumption and the schedule reliability targets for each port call. Furthermore, we derive the optimal speed of the vessel in each leg of the schedule to control for total bunker consumption. Surprisingly, the analytical analysis shows that, if a shipping line has the freedom to choose its preferred berthing times at all ports, it is optimal to set design sailing speeds equal at all legs to maximize schedule reliability.We validate our model using data from a Daily Maersk service, and demonstrate that our schedule can achieve an even higher schedule reliability than the innovative Daily Maersk service schedule, which attained more than 98% reliability in practice, with 11.4% lower bunker consumption. In comparison with a common schedule design heuristic, our model can design service schedules that improve the reliability performance by at least five percentage points, consuming the same amount of bunker. For the same reliability target (of 80%) in schedule design, our model can help reduce bunker consumption by about 11.6% for an 11-week schedule. The savings in bunker consumption can be much more substantial when an ocean carrier aims for higher schedule reliability
Keywords
Schedule reliability, Bunker consumption, Liner shipping, Distributionally robust optimization, Copositive program
Discipline
Operations and Supply Chain Management | Transportation
Research Areas
Operations Management
Publication
Transportation Research Part B: Methodological
Volume
155
First Page
499
Last Page
525
ISSN
0191-2615
Identifier
10.1016/j.trb.2021.11.010
Publisher
Elsevier
Citation
ZHANG, Abraham; ZHENG, Zhichao; and TEO, Chung-Piaw.
Schedule reliability in liner shipping timetable design: A convex programming approach. (2022). Transportation Research Part B: Methodological. 155, 499-525.
Available at: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/lkcsb_research/6955
Copyright Owner and License
Authors
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Additional URL
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.trb.2021.11.010