Integrated schedule and container flow strategy for disrupted liner shipping: a time-space network approach

Amidst more uncertainties in the world, the problems become increasingly serious that liner shipping faces, especially those related to schedule delays and disruptions in container flows caused by unexpected events. Although some of the traditional recovery measures, such as speeding up, skipping ports, or swapping port calls, are applied to a certain extent, the synergistic effects between different recovery strategies have not been fully explored. In this respect, this paper will present an integrated recovery strategy based on the time-space network to accomplish the overall recovery of liner schedules and container flows with the aim of improving the general reliability of the shipping network. The core issues in this study are as follows: (1) how to restore the disrupted shipping service network, (2) how to identify the ports that need to be skipped, and (3) how to design the recovery paths for container flows after port skipping. Consider these problems above; the establishment of a mixed-integer programming model to give full consideration to the residual capacity resources in the shipping network and optimize the recovering paths using the above-mentioned resources minimizes total relevant costs for recovered container flow. This model will help a liner company to create schedule recovery plans more effectively in complex disturbance scenarios and improve the operational efficiency and stability of the network.