Sailing Speed and Fleet Deployment Optimization for Intercontinental Container Liner Shipping Considering Cargo Time Value

This article collectively addresses the issues of optimizing the sailing speed of containerships and fleet deployment in intercontinental container liner shipping, taking cargo time values into consideration. A mixed‐integer nonlinear programming model is developed to maximize the gross profits of a container shipping line. The sailing speed is divided into 0.1 knot intervals and a reciprocal‐discretization method is proposed to transform the model into an integer‐based linear programming model, which can be solved using optimization solvers such as CPLEX. A case study is conducted based on the Far East‐West America liner route of a global container shipping line to assess the effectiveness of the proposed model and the reciprocal‐discretization method. The results show that when the cargo time value is taken into consideration, the increased sailing speed of containerships on long legs and the decreased number of deployed containerships will generate greater operating profits for the container shipping line. The rise in bunker price will lead to a stepwise decline in sailing speed of containerships and a stepwise growth in the number of deployed containerships. Moreover, the downward trend of sailing speed due to the increase of bunker price will be somewhat delayed as the unit container cargo value increases. Several useful insights are drawn from analysis of the results.