Research and Application of Ship Routing and Fleet Planning Model

A ship routing and fleet planning model is developed which takes maximum total profit as objective to improve practicability of study on optimal deployment for ship resource. The short-term scheduling and long-term planning of fleet are combined in the model. A simplex algorithm was designed to solve the linear programming model and numerical tests were provided to illustrate the validity of the model. A ship routing and fleet planning decision system was developed by using the mixed programming technique with Visual Basic and Fortran. The implementation of the system shows that the system is reliable and stable, and its outputs are satisfactory.