Service Network Design of Liner Shipping

International audienceAll shipping liner companies divide their service regions into several rotations (strings) inorder to operate their container vessels. A string is the ordered set of ports at which a container vessel will call. Each port is usually called at no more than twice along one string, although a single port may be called at several times on different strings. Moreover, hub-and-spoke operations is also the core of the operation and a major part of the trade volume is transhipped at least once along the origin-destination path. We present a mixed integer programming model which determines the location of transhipment ports and designs regional routes for the feeder serviens.\\As for even small instance size the problem becomes intractable, we will also present a decomposition scheme developed for solving instances of problem.