Ship Scheduling Optimization Using Mathematical Programming Techniques for Coastal Shipping

Recently, it becomes more and more important to save fuel consumption on shipping for both economical and environmental reasons. For this purpose, there exist software-type methods like weather routing as well as hardwaretype methods like ship shape optimizing, which are very promising. In this paper, a ship scheduling optimization method, a kind of software-type method, is suggested. The method is based on mathematical programming techniques and so fast that it is appliable to maximal-fleet-sized coastal shipping scheduling problems in Japan, which seems to have been not well solvable by existing methods. A real case example shows the suggested method can optimize a 2-week scheduling of about 30 ships in 1 minuite, reducing fuel consumption by about 5 % compared to the original schedule made by human.