Liner Shipping Service Planning Under Sulfur Emission Regulations

Air emissions from ships have become an important issue in sustainable shipping because of the low quality marine fuel consumed by ships. To reduce sulfur shipping, International Maritime Organization has established emission control areas (ECAs) where must use low-sulfur with at most 0.1% or take equivalent emission-reduction measures. The increases costs for liner companies and affects their operations management. This study addresses a holistic service planning problem that integrates fleet deployment, schedule design, sailing path speed optimization, considering effect ECAs. We propose nesting algorithmic framework to address this new challenging problem. Semianalytical solutions are derived optimization problem, which used design. A tailored algorithm is applied solve design problems, deployment. deployment then addressed dynamic programming-based pseudo-polynomial time algorithm. Numerical experiments demonstrate ECAs management can over 2% costs, significant annual operating cost company’s network be as high several billion dollars.