Increasing environmental sustainability by optimizing vessel speed in liner shipping

Abstract

Due to the increasing concern on the environmental impact of the Maritime operations, shipping companies have focused on regulating their fuel consumption. Sailing speed is directly related to the fuel consumption and green house gas emissions. We consider the speed optimization problem in the liner shipping. In this problem, vessel tracks a fixed route to transport cargo and the handling time at ports follows a stochastic process. The objective is to find an optimal speed policy between ports so that the total voyage cost is minimized. We approximate the port times and formulate the problem as nonlinear programming model. The proposed model is tested against an existing shipping schedule. Computational experiments reveal that the proposed method performs well under a variety of conditions.