Designing robust liner shipping schedules: Optimizing recovery actions and buffer times

Liner shipping schedules often cover longer periods of time during which significant delays can occur that increase costs. To avoid unanticipated increases in costs, robust schedules are required. Designing robust schedules requires optimal allocation of buffer time and planning of recovery actions to be taken when facing delay. In this thesis this problem has been addressed by using both a mixed integer programming problem formulation and a heuristic approach. In addition, this thesis discusses possible extensions of the problem, including an approach for taking into account the effect of tides. The results of the methods discussed in this thesis were compared to a schedule with fixed buffer time and maximum speed on every sea leg. This revealed that a cost reduction of 9.6% can be achieved.