Title: Collaborative capacity sharing in liner shipping operations

Authors: Eric Wibisono; Phongchai Jittamai

Addresses: School of Industrial Engineering, Institute of Engineering, Suranaree University of Technology, 111 University Avenue, Muang District, Nakhon Ratchasima 30000, Thailand; Faculty of Engineering, Department of Industrial Engineering, University of Surabaya, Raya Kalirungkut, Surabaya 60293, Indonesia ' School of Industrial Engineering, Institute of Engineering, Suranaree University of Technology, 111 University Avenue, Muang District, Nakhon Ratchasima 30000, Thailand

Abstract: This paper studies collaborative capacity sharing between two liner shipping companies by investigating the impacts of collaboration on the sharing of fuel-consumption. The proposed model is extended from the vehicle routing problem with time windows (VRPTW) through the inclusion of slow-steaming decision variables and constraints to manage the sharing of fuel consumption. Two cases differing in size are developed using Indonesian archipelago for the data background and three policies on fuel-consumption sharing are investigated: open policy, proportionate-sharing policy, and equal-sharing policy. The application of the collaborative model in Indonesian archipelago contributes to the scant literature in maritime logistics collaboration. The optimisation results from generated instances show that the open policy leads to minimum total fuel consumption but the unclear pattern in fuel-consumption sharing between carriers makes it impractical for planning purposes. Moreover, the fuel consumptions of the proportionate-sharing and equal-sharing policies are not significantly different but the smaller variance in the results of the proportionate-sharing policy indicates more predictability. The proportionate-sharing policy is therefore considered the most suitable for route planning.

Keywords: capacity sharing; liner shipping; fuel consumption; slow steaming; vehicle routing problem; VRP; time windows; maritime logistics; collaboration; Indonesia; shipping operations; route planning.

DOI: 10.1504/IJLSM.2015.072752

International Journal of Logistics Systems and Management, 2015 Vol.22 No.4, pp.520 - 539

Received: 08 Apr 2014
Accepted: 09 Sep 2014
Published online: 28 Oct 2015 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article