Enhanced Liner Shipping Network Design using Ant Colony Optimisation

This study presents a novel formulation for the Liner Shipping Network Design Problem and proposes an Ant Colony Optimisation (ACO) based approach to solve this Np-hard optimisation challenge. The problem is formulated as a graph problem and includes key considerations such as fuel costs, idle fuel costs, operational costs, port call costs and canal costs. The proposed approach designs cost effective liner shipping networks by first segmenting the network using the Louvain algorithm and identifying key hub ports based on several factors including transhipment costs. An ACO algorithm is then applied on each subgraph to minimise the overall network costs. The performance of the proposed approach is evaluated using several scenarios based on the LINER-LIB dataset according to execution time, scalability, solution quality and robustness. The results show that the proposed approach achieves up to 66.1% cost savings on large-scale networks and reduces computational time by 65.8%, hence demonstrating its ability to optimise complex liner shipping networks effectively and efficiently.