Decision making in Liner Shipping by cost assessment under uncertainty

Container shipping has revolutionized global transportation since the 1960s. Through specialization and standardization, the unit costs for transport could be reduced further and thus the demand for transport volume increased. Due to economic growth in the world, especially in emerging economies such as China, demand continued to grow and container line companies rose steadily over the years. Due to the financial and subsequent economic crisis from 2008, the market collapsed and freight rates fell. As a result, the transport capacities that had been developed for years and were still under construction could not be utilized any more, so the logic consequence would have been to reduce the size of the fleets. Instead, shipping companies tried to drive the market again by falling prices and to achieve economies of scale and thus reduce costs by building new container vessels with greater capacities. The problem of overcapacity still persists globally. With transport strategies such as slow steaming, container shipping companies were able to adapt to changing conditions, and the problem of overcapacity has been reduced, but persisted. Currently, freight rates for transports from Asia strongly increase since summer 2020. However the sustainability of this development is uncertain, as such developments are not visible in other parts of the world. The continuous existing problem of overcapacity still puts companies under intense pressure, which has led to unprecedented bankruptcies respectively to multiple acquisitions. These problems cannot be solved through further specialization or technical advances in shipbuilding, but only by improvement of the existing transport strategies. In this thesis, three sub-problems of liner shipping are illuminated, approaches are developed and their use are demonstrated. The first approach is the selection of cargo for transport, with the repositioning of the empty containers being included in this consideration. The uncertainties are modeled by fuzzification. The next approach considers the cost of bunker fuel. The existing criticism on the current models of the dependence between speed of the vessel and the consumption is evaluated and is integrated into a new model. The effects of delays and their importance as well as the advantages of reliability are listed and the necessary costs to ensure a certain level of reliability are determined. The last approach deals with the question of which vessels with which characteristics should be used in the services. Usually, the vessels are assessed solely by considering the charter costs, while another here used approach includes the costs of fuel, depending on the reliability. At the end a model is presented, which weights positive and negative consequences of a good reliability. With these methods, some potential in container shipping can be exploited and the efficiency of services and the profit can be increased. All of these results are calculated using computer models that can also be used in the long-term, so that they are supported by computer-based tools in the process of service planning and their decisions are enhanced