Impact analysis of maritime cabotage legislations on liner hub-and-spoke shipping network design

Maritime cabotage is a legislation published by a particular coastal country, which is used to conduct the cargo transportation between its two domestic ports. This paper proposes a two-phase mathematical programming model to formulate the liner hub-and-spoke shipping network design problem subject to the maritime cabotage legislations, i.e., the hub location and feeder allocation problem for phase I and the ship route design with ship fleet deployment problem for phase II. The problem in phase I is formulated as a mixed-integer linear programming model. By developing a hub port expanding technique, the problem in phase II is formulated as a vehicle routing problem with pickup and delivery. A Lagrangian relaxation based solution method is proposed to solve it. Numerical implementations based on the Asia-Europe-Oceania shipping services are carried out to account for the impact analysis of the maritime cabotage legislations on liner hub-and-spoke shipping network design problem. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.