Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Fig. 1.
A subset of a case study of the LSFRP, from [17]
as the
repositioning vessel
, which is the vessel under the control of a repositioning
coordinator, and the
on-service vessel
, which is the vessel assigned to a slot on
the service being offered as an SOS opportunity. Repositioning vessels can use
SOS opportunities by replacing the on-service vessel and sailing in its place for
a portion of the service. SOS opportunities save significant amounts of money
on bunker fuel, since one vessel is sailing where there would have otherwise been
two. Using an SOS can even sometimes earn money through the leasing of the
on-service vessel. Using an SOS is subject to a number of constraints, which are
described in full in [16].
Asia-CA3 Case Study.
Figure 1 shows a subset of a real repositioning scenario
in which a vessel must be repositioned from its initial service (the phase-out
service), the Chennai-Express, to the goal service (the phase-in service), the
Intra-WCSA. The Asia-CA3 service is offered as a SOS opportunity to the vessel
repositioning from Chennai Express to Intra-WCSA. One possible repositioning
could involve a vessel leaving the Chennai Express at
hkg
where it can pick up the Asia-CA3, thereby replacing the on-service vessel. The
repositioning vessel would then sail along the Asia-CA3 until it gets to
tpp
, and sailing to
,
where it can join the Intra-WCSA. Note that no vessel sails on the backhaul
of the Asia-CA3, and this is allowed because very little cargo travels on the
Asia-CA3 towards Asia.
blb
2.1 Literature Review
The LSFRP has recently begun to receive attention in the literature, but it
was not mentioned in either of the most influential surveys of work in the liner
shipping domain [6,7] or container terminals [14]. Although there has been signif-
icant work on problems such as the Fleet Deployment Problem (FDP) (e.g., [13])
and the Network Design Problem (NDP) (e.g. [1,11]), these problems deal with
strategic decisions related to building the network and assigning vessels to ser-
vices, rather than the operational problem of finding paths for vessels through
the network. Additionally, the vessel schedule recovery problem (VSRP) [3] dif-
fers in that it lacks the cost saving activities of the LSFRP due to its short time
