Liner shipping routing, fleet sizing and speed optimization with application to Asia - Northern Europe-trade

One of the key players in world trade that facilitates global economic growth in general and the prosperity of international shipping in particular is maritime transportation. This paper examines a tactical aspect of maritime transportation that consists of containership routing and speed optimization for maritime liner services, in which goods are transported between a set of predetermined ports. We present an integer linear programming model for the containership routing and fleet sizing problem, in which the sailing speed is constant. We present also a simple heuristic for speed optimization. Our objective is to find the best sequence of ports to visit, the optimal sailing speed and the optimal number of vessels to deploy in the service while minimizing liner service bunker fuel cost and the vessel fixed costs. We present an application on French Asia Line 2 operated by CMA-CGM between Asia and Northern Europe to exhibit the effectiveness of the model. We provide a study on the effect of some of the main model parameters, such as bunker fuel price, on the optimal solution. The numerical results confirm the relevance of the used methodology.