The concept is based on daughter ships acting as feeder vessels that meet with the mother ship at suitable locations at sea to tranship cargo. Such a system requires that the routes of both mother ship and daughter ships are synchronized. We provide a path flow formulation for the problem of determining the optimal set of routes for both ships. Non-dominated routes are generated a priori using a dynamic programming label-setting algorithm and used as input for the model. We use the model and solution approach to solve a real-world case from the Norwegian west coast. The results can be used to determine the optimal routes for mother and daughter ships as well as the optimal size of the daughter ships.
Here we study a short-sea feeder network design problem based on mother and daughter vessels. The main feature of the studied system is performing transshipment of cargo between mother and daughter vessels at appropriate locations at sea. This operation requires synchronization between both types of vessels as they have to meet at the same location at the same time. This paper studies the problem of designing a synchronized feeder network, explicitly accounting for the effect of uncertain travel times caused by harsh weather conditions. We propose an optimization-simulation framework to find robust solutions for the transportation system. The optimization model finds optimal routes that are then evaluated by a discrete-even simulation model to measure their robustness under uncertain weather conditions. This process of optimization simulation is repeated until a satisfactory condition is reached. To find even better solutions, we include different performance-improving strategies by adding robustness during route generation or exploiting flexibility in sailing speed to recover from delays. We apply the solution method to a case based on realistic data from a Norwegian shipping company. The results show that the method finds near-optimal solutions that offer robustness against schedule perturbations due to harsh weather. They also highlight the importance of considering uncertainty when designing a short-sea feeder network with transshipment at sea.
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