Bounds on ship deployment in container shipping with time windows

Abstract

This paper extends and complements the liner shipping literature by examining the ship deployment decision in the presence of time windows at container ports. A set of tight bounds on the number of ships that can be deployed is derived, revealing a number of fundamental insights into the impact of time windows on ship deployment. The bounds in this paper can also enable the extension of single-route shipping models that have appeared in the literature to the system-wide level by taming the increase in computational requirements.

Keywords:

• Transport
• logistics
• supply chain
• maritime
• container

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.