Liner shipping service network design with empty container repositioning

This paper proposes a liner shipping service network design problem with combined hub‐and‐spoke and multi‐port‐calling operations and empty container repositioning. It first introduces a novel concept – segment – defined as a pair of ordered ports served by one shipping line and subsequently develops a mixed‐integer linear programming model for the proposed problem. Extensive numerical experiments based on realistic Asia–Europe–Oceania shipping operations show that the proposed model can be efficiently solved by CPLEX for real‐case problems. They also demonstrate the potential for large cost‐savings over pure hub‐and‐spoke or pure multi‐port‐calling network, or network without considering empty container repositioning.