An integrated model for ship routing with transshipment and berth allocation

This article studies a decision problem faced by short sea shipping companies that operate both container vessels and container terminals. The problem is to jointly decide container ship routing, berth allocation at the terminals, as well as transshipment of containers to minimize the overall operating cost. The problem is formulated as an integer programming model and an iterative decomposition heuristic method is proposed for the solution of this complex problem. Computational experiments are conducted on problem instances that simulate the practice of a feeder service company operating around the Pearl River Delta region. Results show that integrating the decisions on ship routing, berth allocation, and transshipment of containers can achieve significant benefit compared with traditional approaches in which sequential and independent decisions are made.