A port of call selecting model of proforma scheduled voyage line for liner shipping companies

The significance of point to point services has gradually declined and increasingly the trend is to develop complex liner service networks, which rely on the hub-and-relay concept. This enables the liner operators to increase the port coverage with only marginal increase in cost. As a result, slots chartering and/or vessel sharing and other types of collaboration arrangements have evolved, which enable optimized returns in an ever-increasing cost environment. In this ever-increasingly competitive market, it is crucial for liner operators to plan carefully their service networks, which in turn directly affect the cost, revenue and customer service. The liner companies set liner routes by investigating the container amount between each two ports. To select the most suitable ports, we have analyzed the procedures of setting liner routes in order to have a deep study in the voyage costs. And finally a model is formulated to maximize the profits of the voyage. A deal of numerical experiments have been done to prove the feasibility and effectiveness of the model.