Sustainable decision model for liner shipping industry

Maritime transport facilitates international trade activities and contributes to world's economic growth and prosperity. Still maritime transport faces several operations challenges such as non-storability of shipping space, matching supply with dynamic shipping demand, and non-availability of fair allocation mechanism in the age of information exchange systems due to ban of anticompetitive liner conference amongst others. This paper develops a sustainable decision model for allocating ship capacity to satisfy shipping demand and to generate a route plan. The model is referred as sustainable because it determines flexible freight rates and coordinates market players with social interest. The paper uses multi-agent system modeling and an iterative combinatorial auction mechanism with Vickrey-Clarke-Groves payments to deploy ships at economically efficient prices in the age of information exchange systems. To tackle the computational complexity of multi-agent system model with auction mechanism, this paper proposes an enumerative search algorithm. Our proposed model and method can aid liner shipping industry managers to better realize their desired economical and social sustainable decisions targets by sharing information, costs, and benefits. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.