Assignment of transit container bookings for a transit agency

Abstract

Overseas containers sometimes cannot be directly shipped to their destinations, but first unloaded, temporarily stored and then loaded onto smaller vessels at interim ports to save cost and/or to transport them to their final destinations directly. The assignment of these transshipment containers to vessels necessitates several measures to be taken into account simultaneously. We develop a mathematical model that considers the assignment of such containers to different vessels while optimizing multiple objectives. We provide a numerical example and present our conclusions. © Izmir University of Economics, Turkey, 2010.