An Efficient Immune Algorithm for Container Marine Transport

The trend of utilization of mega containerships in international marine transportation is more and more obvious. Mega containerships benefit the carriers and port operators more than small ones, which is due to the less unit cost of the former. Thereby, the general goal is to figure for the economies of scale of container transportation network. In order to achieve this benefit, the optimization schedule based on Immune Algorithm (IA) will be performed in this paper, so as to reposition a reasonable transport system. The proposed procedure consists of two steps. In step one, an optimization model mainly concerning the container cost engendered in the process of transportation is constructed to seek for the minimum total cost and corresponding vessel type and schedule. In step two, an immune network algorithm with interaction and suppression is applied to build the transportation network. The performance of IA indicates that it can resolve this complicated combinational optimization problem fleetly and efficiently.