Ship scheduling problems in tramp shipping considering static and spot cargoes

摘要

Tramp shipping is the main transportation mode for dry bulk cargoes in international trade, which is possible to be affected by several stochastic factors (e.g., uncertain demand, weather). The focus of this paper is to study the ship scheduling problems by taking into account the uncertainty of cargo demand (called spot cargo in the paper), seasonal fluctuation of demand and unseaworthy condition caused by weather factors. To solve the ship scheduling problem (SSP), a mixed integer programming model is constructed by maximising the profit of all the voyages of a company during the planning period. Since the problem is similar to an NP-hard problem, a heuristic method is proposed to process it. Then, the data of a shipping company in China are used to test the model and the approach. The computed results show that the proposed method can provide good ship routing and scheduling solutions to real-instances.