Shipping optimisation systems (SOS): liner optimisation perspective

Most of the few papers which have been published on 'optimisation in liner shipping' give a great deal of attention to allocating ships to shipping lines. Papers usually assume voyage gross profit to be constant, with restricting assumption on transport demand, ship speed, and port stay. To streamline these ideas, shipping optimisation systems (SOS), a suite of decision support systems, is developed to optimise voyage gross profit, subject to deterministic or stochastic cargo demand. Sensitivity and what‐if analysis are adopted, in case of any change is made to cargo quantity or freight, cargo handling rate or charges, and ship speed or fuel consumption. SOS uses the optimised voyage gross profit to optimally allocate fleet units to shipping lines. In a competitive environment with old ships, SOS optimally allocates new ships to lines in order to figure out their prospective gross profit, and appraise their worthiness.