Industrial and Tramp Ship Routing and Scheduling Problems with Speed Optimization and Split Loads

Industrial and tramp shipping are two of the main shipping industries within seaborne transportation. For those industries, the goal is to minimize the total operational cost of the fleet plus the use of spot charters when not all cargoes can be transported by the fleet. Hence, efficient schedules must be made for the vessels such that at minimum cost all cargoes are transported. In the existing literature, this problem is referred to as the industrial and tramp ship routing and scheduling problem (ITSRSP). The purpose of our thesis is to analyze whether extending this problem to more real-life applications results in lower total operational cost. We focus on three extensions of the industrial and tramp ship routing and scheduling problem. Namely, to speed optimization, to split loads and to both speed optimization and split loads. The results showed that extending the ITSRSP to speed optimization, could reduce the total cost on average with 25% compared to the cost of ITSRSP without any extensions. For the extension to split loads, the results showed that the operational cost could reduce up to around 16% compared to the cost without extensions. However unfortunately, the average cost reduction for this extension is only 2%. Lastly, the extension to both speed optimization and split