Disruption Recovery for a Vessel in Liner Shipping

Container vessels in liner shipping are operated on closed-loop routes following a preannounced schedule. In practice, when a vessel embarks on a voyage on the sea, there are lots of uncertain factors that may delay a vessel from its original schedule, even if some uncertainty has been considered in the tactical network design. In this paper, the authors propose an operational-level solution to recover the disrupted schedule caused by a delay, where the authors consider different operational actions such as speeding up, port skipping, and port swapping. For the case where only speeding up is allowed, the authors approach the problem by nonlinear programming and obtain certain structural results of the optimal recovery schedule. It shows that speeding up can effectively handle a delay that is not too large. When there is a large delay, which may be called a major disruption, the authors study the problem with more options such as port skipping and swapping and develop dynamic programming algorithms on the discretized time space. The authors also provide a method to estimate a lower bound of the problem that enables us to evaluate the relative error caused by the discretized time space in dynamic programming. Numerical studies are conducted to validate the authors' results and derive managerial insights.

• Record URL:
  https://doi.org/10.1287/trsc.2015.0589
• Availability:
  • Find a library where document is available. Order URL: http://worldcat.org/oclc/1767714
• Supplemental Notes:
  • Abstracts reprinted with permission of INFORMS (Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences, http://www.informs.org).
• Authors:
  • Li, Chen
  • 0000-0001-6915-9368
  • Qi, Xiangtong
  • Lee, Chung-Yee
• Publication Date: 2015-11

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Web
• Features: References;
• Pagination: pp 900-921
• Serial:
  • Transportation Science
  • Volume: 49
  • Issue Number: 4
  • Publisher: Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS)
  • ISSN: 0041-1655
  • Serial URL: http://transci.journal.informs.org/

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Dynamic programming; Liner shipping; Service disruption; Speeding; Vessel operations
• Subject Areas: Freight Transportation; Marine Transportation; Operations and Traffic Management; Planning and Forecasting; I72: Traffic and Transport Planning;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01581881
• Record Type: Publication
• Files: TRIS
• Created Date: Nov 25 2015 9:14AM