Container Ship Routing Design Considering Combined Patterns and Plans of Loaded and Empty Containers

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.