Industrial and Tramp Ship Routing with Varying Ship Speeds

This paper looks into different approaches at solving the routing and scheduling problem present in industrial and tramp maritime shipping. Using benchmark instances, solutions are provided by a solver for a mathematical formulation of the problem and by an adaptive large neighborhood search heuristic. In addition, a layer of realism is added by introducing choices for speed tiers into the existing problem. The extended problem is also fed to a solver using the same benchmarks, and its results are analyzed in order to determine whether this is a meaningful addition to more sophisticated solving techniques in the future. These three approaches are compared with regards to performance for each of the benchmark instances. From this, conclusions are drawn on which type of approach is suitable for which type of instance. Ultimately, recommendations are made for future research into improving the approaches at solving the routing and scheduling problem that are discussed here.