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Ship Routing Using Genetic Algorithms

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Abstract

Consideration is given to a ship routing problem (SRP) where a container-ship fleet performs pickups and deliveries of containers between a hub and a set of spoke ports. SRPs are a type of vehicle routing problem (VRP) in maritime environments where vehicles are vessels or ships and the customers to be served are ports. Given the inherent complexity of this class of problems, heuristic methods seem to offer the most promise for practical size problem instances. After describing SRP as a capacitated VRP on a graph with pickups, deliveries, and time window constraints, we present a new population heuristic for its solution. Computational experiments for a variety of operating environments show the effectiveness of the developed approach. The results demonstrate very satisfactory performance in terms of both solution time and quality.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Business Administration, University of Patras, 26504, Patras, Greece

    Nikolaos Charalambopoulos & Andreas C. Nearchou

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  1. Nikolaos Charalambopoulos
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  2. Andreas C. Nearchou
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Correspondence to Andreas C. Nearchou.

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Charalambopoulos, N., Nearchou, A.C. Ship Routing Using Genetic Algorithms. SN Oper. Res. Forum 2, 45 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s43069-021-00093-w

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