The container shipping network design problem with empty container repositioning [An article from: Transportation Research Part E]

This digital document is a journal article from Transportation Research Part E, published by Elsevier in 2007. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Media Library immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Description:
This paper addresses the design of container liner shipping service networks by explicitly taking into account empty container repositioning. Two key and interrelated issues, those of deploying ships and containers are usually treated separately by most existing studies on shipping network design. In this paper, both issues are considered simultaneously. The problem is formulated as a two-stage problem. A genetic algorithm-based heuristic is developed for the problem. Through a number of numerical experiments that were conducted it was shown that the problem with the consideration of empty container repositioning provides a more insightful solution than the one without.