This thesis studies two related topics in liner shipping. The first topic is the contract pricing problem for container carriers. The second part studies the interaction of the longer term contracts and the spot markets/exchanges for the same goods/services.Most containerized freight is...

There are over 20 'components' in an international door-to-door transportation, ranging from warehousing and distribution, to forwarding, documentation, transportation, customs clearance, etc.. As tariffs in ocean transportation tend to converge due to competition and service homogenization,...

As bunker fuel cost constitutes a major portion of the shipping liners’ operating cost, it is imperative for them to minimize the bunkering cost to remain competitive. Service contract with a fuel supplier is a strategy they venture on to reduce this cost. Typically, liner operators enter into...

The problem of optimal container vessels deployment is one of great significance for the liner shipping industry. Although the pioneering work on this problem dates back to the early 1990s, only until recently have researchers started to acknowledge and account for the significant amount of...

We present an integer programming based heuristic, a matheuristic, for the liner shipping network design problem. This problem consists of finding a set of container shipping routes defining a capacitated network for cargo transport. The objective is to maximize the revenue of cargo transport,...