This paper presents a decision support methodology for strategic planning in tramp and industrial shipping. The proposed methodology combines simulation and optimization, where a Monte Carlo simulation framework is built around an optimization-based decision support system for short-term routing...

Shipping companies must manage their fleets efficiently in order to stay in business. Ship routing and scheduling is a complex planning problem that may play an important role in this respect. We present TurboRouter, a decision support system that has been developed to aid planners in this...

This paper considers the real problem of determining an efficient policy for a supply operation in the Norwegian Sea, where a number of offshore installations are serviced from an onshore depot by supply vessels. The purpose of the study was to evaluate the effect on the total supply cost of...

Scheduling shipments of bulk cargoes when multiple cargoes may be on board a vessel simultaneously is an especially complicated task. Most research on such bulk ship routing and scheduling problems has focused on solving a simplified version of the real problem, which we denote as the basic...

This paper considers a maritime inventory routing problem faced by a major cement producer. A heterogeneous fleet of bulk ships transport multiple non-mixable cement products from producing factories to regional silo stations along the coast of Norway. Inventory constraints are present both at...

This paper introduces a new problem to the OR community that combines traditional tramp shipping with a vendor managed inventory (VMI) service. Such a service may replace the more traditional contract of affreightment (COA) which for decades has been the standard agreement between a tramp...

We review research on ship routing and scheduling and related problems during the new millennium and provide four basic models in this domain. The volume of research in this area about doubles every decade as does the number of research outlets. We have found over a hundred new refereed papers...

The supply vessel planning problem is a maritime transportation problem faced by amongst others the energy company Statoil. A set of offshore installations requires supplies from an onshore supply depot on a regular basis, a service performed by a fleet of offshore supply vessels. The problem...

Shipping companies repeatedly face the problem of adjusting their vessel fleet to meet uncertain future transportation demands and compensating for aging vessels. In this paper, a new multi-stage stochastic programming formulation for strategic fleet renewal in shipping is proposed. The new...