Efficient stowage plan with loading and unloading operations for shipping liners using foldable containers and shift cost-sharing

In this paper, we investigate the foldable container slot planning problem with loading and unloading operations that include shifting containers in a shipping line. We use the global optimal perspective in which a terminal operator generates an optimal stowage plan created on the basis of demand at subsequent ports. State-of-the-art foldable containers have been recently used in commercial maritime transport systems because they confer space-saving advantages when folded. We investigate container use through mixed-integer programming and shift cost-sharing methods as means to prevent conflicts between ports over inessential shifts and to provide guidelines for distributing shift costs among all ports in a logical and fair way. Through the proposed model, we found that most inessential shifts, considered inevitable from the local optimal perspective, can be eliminated, and the inevitable shift costs can be fairly distributed.This article is a revised and expanded version of a paper entitled ‘Shift Minimization with Loading and Unloading Operations using Foldable Containers’ presented at the first Conference of the Yangtze-River Research and Innovation Belt(Y-RIB), Zhoushan, China; 2–5 December 2018.