A computer-based decision support system for vessel fleet scheduling - experience and future research

Most ocean shipping companies do the planning of fleet schedules manually based on their experience. Only a few use optimization-based decision support systems (DSS). This paper presents TurboRouter, a decision support system for vessel fleet scheduling, as well as some of the experience gathered from a research project to develop commercial software that is now used by several shipping companies. Perhaps the most important experience is that when designing such systems, the focus should be directed more to the interaction between the user and the system than the optimization algorithm, which has often been the case. (C) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.