Maritime fleet deployment in ro-ro shipping under inventory constraints

We present a tactical maritime fleet deployment problem in roll-on roll-off (ro-ro) liner shipping scenario, which deals with optimally assigning planned voyages to the available vessels in a fleet to determine the routing and scheduling of vessels across the given trade routes, in order to maximize profit or minimize cost. This paper presents a new model for a fleet deployment problem in liner shipping that considers inventory constraints at ports for vendor managed cargo in each route and determines optimal shipment sizes for those cargoes, between corresponding origin and destination ports. We present an MILP formulation for the problem described above, a scheme to generate appropriate datasets, and computational results for the problem. (C) 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.