Cooperative Liner Shipping Network Design by Means of a Combinatorial Auction

A liner shipping network design problem is considered which includes ship scheduling and cargo routing decisions. The question is how to enable loose cooperation of multiple liner shippers for jointly solving this profit maximizing network design problem. A variable neighborhood search matheuristic is developed to compute a network for each liner shipper. To coordinate the planning process of multiple liner shippers, a combinatorial auction is proposed. To evaluated the mechanism a computational study is performed which shows that cooperation is in many cases possible and beneficial. As the proposed joint planning mechanism requires less exchange of sensitive information compared to a centralized approach, it enables looser forms of cooperation during network design.