Schedule design for sustainable container supply chain networks with port time windows

This paper studies a practical liner shipping schedule design problem with port time windows for container supply chain networks. A mixed-integer nonlinear non-convex model that incorporates the availability of ports is proposed to minimize the sum of ship cost and fuel cost (and thereby pollutant emission). In view of the structure of the problem, we reformulate it as an integer linear optimization model and propose an iterative optimization approach. The proposed solution method is applied to two liner networks operated by a global shipping line. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.