Optimizing automotive maritime transportation in Ro-Ro and container shipping

This study investigates an automotive maritime transportation planning problem, considering roll-on/roll-off (Ro-Ro) shipping and container shipping. Automobiles are distributed from a manufacturer to overseas dealers through maritime transportation. This transportation process involves three key decisions: the choice of maritime transportation mode for the automobiles, the shipping volume of the ships, and the routes of the ships. We investigate the above decisions and explore how to allocate automobiles to ships and ports to minimize total transportation costs. Considering the differences between Ro-Ro shipping and container shipping, we propose a mixed integer linear programming model to optimize maritime transportation plans for automobile distribution. We design a column generation algorithm to solve the model, in which an acceleration tactic is proposed to shorten the time required to resolve the pricing problem. The effectiveness of our algorithm is validated using experiments with both real and synthetic data based on an ocean shipping case and an offshore case. The computational results show that our algorithm can yield an optimal solution in a significantly shorter time than the CPLEX solver. Furthermore, we draw managerial implications from our sensitivity analyses that can be useful to automobile manufacturers. In addition, three extensions that consider additional real-world factors are discussed to generalize the findings to more generic contexts.