In maritime transportation, liner shipping accounts for over 60\% of the
value of goods shipped. However, very limited literature is available on
the study of various problems in liner shipping.
In this thesis we focus on problems related to this industry.
Given a set of cargo to be transported, a set of
ports and a set of ships, a common problem faced by carriers in liner
shipping is the design of their service network.
We develop an integrated model to design service network for the ships
and to route the available cargo, simultaneously.
The proposed model incorporates many
relevant constraints, such as the weekly frequency constraint on the
operated routes, and emerging trends, such as obtaining benefits from
transshipping cargo on two or more service routes, that appear in practice
but have not been considered previously in literature. Also, we design
exact and heuristic algorithms to solve the integer program efficiently.
The proposed algorithms integrate the ship scheduling problem, a tactical
planning level decision, and the cargo routing problem, an operational planning
level decision, and provide good overall solution strategy. Computational
experiments indicate that larger problem instances, as
compared to the literature, can be solved using these algorithms in acceptable computational time.
Alliance formation is very common among global liner carriers however a
quantitative study of liner alliances is missing from literature. We
provide a mathematical framework for the quantitative study of these alliances.
For the formation of a sustainable alliance,
carriers need to agree on an overall service network and resolve issues
concerning distribution of benefits and costs among the members of the alliance.
We develop mechanisms to design a collaborative
service network and to manage the interaction among the carriers
through the allocation of profits in a fair
way. The mechanism utilizes inverse optimization techniques to obtain
resource exchange costs in the network. These costs provide side
payments to the members, on top of the revenue generated by them in the
collaborative solution, to motivate them to act in the best interest of
the alliance while satisfying their own self interests.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:GATECH/oai:smartech.gatech.edu:1853/16314 |
| Date | 09 July 2007 |
| Creators | Agarwal, Richa |
| Publisher | Georgia Institute of Technology |
| Source Sets | Georgia Tech Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Archive |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Dissertation |
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