For the rapid development of container shipping industry, the structure of container shipping routes becomes more and more sophisticated. They have already shifted from three simply patterns to a combined pattern. Moreover, the expected maximum profit is crucial to judge the route alternatives, while the profit is affected by the loaded/empty container transport schemes as well as route structure. Therefore, it is very important to develop a model for container ship routing with combined pattern in the condition of taking the transport plans of loaded/empty containers into account. In this paper, the concept of the combined structure is proposed and the optimization of loaded/empty container transport is described. Then, a mixed integer model is developed. In case study, the model is used to optimize East- Asia to Europe ship routing.
展开▼
