Constructing Container Shipping Networks with Empty Container Repositioning among Calling Ports - a Genetic Algorithm Approach

This paper addresses the design of container liner shipping service networks by explicitly taking into account empty container repositioning and container fleet size. Two key and interrelated issues of deployments of ships and containers are usually treated separately by most existing studies on shipping network design. In this paper, both issues are considered simultaneously. The problem is formulated as a two-stage problem: the upper-problem being formulated as a Knapsack problem and the lower-problem as a Flow problem. A genetic algorithm based heuristic is developed for the problem. Through a number of numerical experiments that were conducted it was shown that the problem considering empty container repositioning provides a more insightful solution than the one without.