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...

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...