Robust Dry Bulk Fleet Route Optimization Under Navigation Risk Consideration

Abstract

Dry bulk shipping plays an essential role in international bulk commodity transportation. The dry bulk shipping company that operates a fleet has to design an efficient and safe route for each vessel to complete the transportation task and reduce the navigation risk on the course. Considering the navigation risk is uncertain, we use the robust optimization approach to optimize the routes for a dry bulk shipping fleet. We aim to determine the shipping route that can minimize the total transportation cost and ensure that the navigation risk is no more than a certain threshold. To address this problem, this paper first develops a deterministic formulation for the dry bulk fleet route planning. Then its robust counterpart is formulated to incorporate the uncertain navigation risk, which can ensure the worst-case navigation risk shall not exceed the given threshold. At last, we carry out a series of numerical experiments using actual data to evaluate the performance of our approach. The numerical results reveal that our approach can efficiently solve the route planning problem and make the trade-off between navigation risk and total transportation cost.

Keywords

• Dry bulk fleet
• navigation risk
• robust optimization
• uncertainty
• route planning