Collaborative capacity sharing in liner shipping operations

This paper studies collaborative capacity sharing between two liner shipping companies by investigating the impacts of collaboration on the sharing of fuel‐consumption. The proposed model is extended from the vehicle routing problem with time windows (VRPTW) through the inclusion of slow‐steaming decision variables and constraints to manage the sharing of fuel consumption. Two cases differing in size are developed using Indonesian archipelago for the data background and three policies on fuel‐consumption sharing are investigated: open policy, proportionate‐sharing policy, and equal‐sharing policy. The application of the collaborative model in Indonesian archipelago contributes to the scant literature in maritime logistics collaboration. The optimisation results from generated instances show that the open policy leads to minimum total fuel consumption but the unclear pattern in fuel‐consumption sharing between carriers makes it impractical for planning purposes. Moreover, the fuel consumptions of the proportionate‐sharing and equal‐sharing policies are not significantly different but the smaller variance in the results of the proportionate‐sharing policy indicates more predictability. The proportionate‐sharing policy is therefore considered the most suitable for route planning.