Model and algorithm for a liner ship fleet planning problem with uncertain container shipment demand

This paper deals with a short-term liner ship fleet Planning (LSFP) problem with container shipment demand uncertainty. Assuming that container shipment demand between any two ports on each ship route follows a normal distribution, this paper develops an integer linear programming model with chance constraints for the LSFP problem and proposes a two-phase heuristic algorithm for solving the large-scale LSFP instances. Finally, numerical examples are used to show application of the proposed model and evaluate the performance of the two-phase heuristic algorithm.