Maritime transportation

In this presentation, we will give an overview of some planning problems within maritime transportation at the various planning levels. We start at the strategic fleet planning level and discuss the design of fleets and sea transport systems. We continue with the tactical and operational fleet planning level and consider problems that comprise various ship routing and scheduling aspects. Here we discuss the different modes of operations separately, namely industrial, tramp and liner shipping. Examples of real cases, elements of models and solution methods will be given. A commercial decision support system used for ship routing and scheduling will be briefly presented, and some experiences with the system will be given. Finally, we present some trends regarding future developments and use of optimization-based decision support systems for ship routing and scheduling. Several of the trends indicate both accelerating needs for and benefits from such systems.

Marielle Christiansen obtained her Ph.D. in Operations Research at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in 1996. She is a Professor of Operations Research at the same university. Her main research interests are routing and scheduling issues within transportation and logistics and particularly applications within maritime transportation. She has been involved in a number of shipping industry-sponsored projects. Her work within ship routing and scheduling has resulted in numerous papers in international journals like Annals of Operations Research, European Journal of Operational Research, International Transactions in Operational Research, Journal of the Operational Research Society, Naval Research and Logistics as well as Transportation Science.