“…Therefore, we propose a column generation algorithm to generate good vessel plans. Column generation algorithm has been widely and successfully applied to many large-scale, real-life optimization problems in the areas such as transportation (Barnhart et al, 1998, Baldacci et al, 2011, Liang et al 2014, Meng et al 2015, machine scheduling (Van den Akker et al 1999, Chen et al 1999, bioinformatics (Chou et al, 2015), to name but a few. In column generation, when the number of variables in a LP model is too large to enumerate explicitly, a subset of feasible variables is constructed first.…”