Title: Robust optimisation of liner shipping network on Yangtze River with considering weather influences

Authors: Zhongzhen Yang; Dongxu Chen

Addresses: College of Transportation Management, Dalian Maritime University, Dalian, 116026, China ' College of Transportation Management, Dalian Maritime University, Dalian, 116026, China

Abstract: With robust optimisation and considering the weather influences, liner shipping network on Yangtze River is designed. A model optimising shipping network is built based on the attributes of the river to determine the network, the fleet size and the operation frequency. To consider the bad weather, the robust optimisation method is used to evolve the former model to a robust one. A numerical examination is done by taking 12 ports and 28 cities along the river as the nodes. It is shown that only one type of vessel will be used if the weather influences are considered, while when the weather influences are not considered different types of vessels should be used in different river segments. In the robust network, containers may change from waterway to highway and the profit of waterway declines by 30.5%, while the reliability of the transportation in the region along the river increases by 25%.

Keywords: Yangtze River; liner shipping; network; robust optimisation; weather influences; containerised transportation; user equilibrium.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSTL.2017.086273

International Journal of Shipping and Transport Logistics, 2017 Vol.9 No.5, pp.626 - 639

Accepted: 24 Sep 2015
Published online: 04 Sep 2017 *

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