The Pacific Ocean liner shipping market appears to be cartelized, primarily because of antitrust exemptions for shipping companies’ agreements. The current industry consolidation trend driven by economies of scale is likely to nurture the collusion inducing environment further; thus,...

Cooperation in the ocean liner shipping industry has always been important to improve liner shipping networks (LSN's). As tight cooperations like alliances are challenged by antitrust laws, looser forms of cooperation among liner carriers might become a reasonable way to increase efficiency of...

This paper aims at analyzing the hinterland position of the German port of Hamburg in Central Europe. As a first step, we identify Koper and Gdansk ports that could act as potential competitors to the German ports, since they exhibit a dynamic development in container throughput over the last...

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...

It is widespread international practice that cargo liners meet at regular conferences to fix prices and quotas for individual routes. Presently, however, the respective European regulation granting liners an exemption from competition laws is under review. Liners claim that conferences are a...

Container liner shipping, shipping network, network design, network structure, ship deployment. - This thesis studies network design in container liner shipping by concentrating on four research questions: - How were operational patterns deployed in route design? - How was container shipping...