A novel modeling approach for the fleet deployment problem within a short-term planning horizon

This paper is concerned with model development for a short-term fleet deployment problem of liner shipping operations. We first present a mixed integer nonlinear programming model in which the optimal vessel speeds for different vessel types on different routes are interpreted as their realistic optimal travel times. We then linearize the proposed nonlinear model and obtain a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) model that can be efficiently solved by a standard mixed integer programming solver such as CPLEX The MILP model determines the optimal route service frequency pattern and take into account the time window constraints of shipping services. Finally, we report our numerical results and performance of CPLEX on randomly generated instances. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.