Transatlantic maritime transportation between the Czech Republic and the United States

Maritime transportation is the backbone of today´s world trade and therefore there special attention should be paid to all subjects concerning this mode of transportation. It is also necessary to complement maritime transportation by other modes, such as rail and/or truck (road). This thesis deals with the problems of maritime transportation and provides the summary of recent developments, trends and statistics mainly on Transatlantic maritime routes (Europe to U.S.). Besides maritime transportation, this thesis also reviews the trends and statistics of rail and truck (road) transportation in U.S. and Europe. The second part of thesis seeks to create a mathematical model of transportation between Europe and U.S. The line haul is maritime transportation and the complementary modes of transportation from the ports to/from cities (points of destination/origin) are rail and truck (road). The models are formulated for shipping goods from Europe to U.S. The first model, Transatlantic Multi-Mode Container Routing Problem (TMMCRP), is developed by author himself. The second one, Transnational Collaborative Multi-Mode Shipping Problem (TCMMSP), already existed in a different formulation and the author adjusted it to be applicable to the case study. The last part of the thesis deals with a case study. The author considers four Czech biggest cities (points of origin), five European ports, eight U.S. ports and 10 biggest cities in U.S. (points of destination). The adapted Transnational Collaborative Multi-Mode Shipping Problem (TCMMSP) is applied to this case study and it seeks to solve the transportation of a set of five shipments with unique O-D pairs and volume. The end of the thesis summarizes the results and analyses the average costs, optimal set volume, optimal shipment routing and port analysis