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A Branch-and-Price Method for a Ship Routing and Scheduling Problem with Stowage Constraints

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 9335))

Abstract

In this paper we study a maritime pickup and delivery problem with time windows and stowage constraints. The problem is inspired by a real life ship routing and scheduling problem from a sub-segment of shipping known as project shipping. What is unique about this sub-segment is that they transport unique and specialized cargoes, that make stowage onboard the ships complex, and thus must be considered when creating routes and schedules for the ships. To solve this problem we propose a branch-and-price method, including a novel way of solving the subproblems using a labeling algorithm. To speed up the solution process we relax some of the restrictions in the subproblem, giving us a simpler subproblem that may produce infeasible paths. The computational results show the branch-and-price method provides optimal solutions to many instances previously unsolved by the literature, and that it is competitive with the tabu search heuristic for many instances.

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Correspondence to Magnus Stålhane .

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Stålhane, M. (2015). A Branch-and-Price Method for a Ship Routing and Scheduling Problem with Stowage Constraints. In: Corman, F., Voß, S., Negenborn, R. (eds) Computational Logistics. ICCL 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9335. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-24264-4_11

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-24264-4_11

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-24263-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-24264-4

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