Ship route evolutionary optimization of multiple ship companies for distributed coordination of resources

This paper proposes a ship route evolutionary optimization method for competitive ship companies in the industrial logistic network, where many alliances composed of several ship companies compete with others to acquire their resources (i.e., container) for maximizing their profits. One of the significant issues in the industrial logistic network is to find the best distribution of the resources in all alliances even in a competitive market. For this purpose, this paper explores the ship route optimization method for all competitive alliances, which can find their ship routes having higher profit than their actual routes through a good distributed coordination of resources. The intensive analysis of the results on the Pacific Ocean liner route with the actual data have revealed that the following implications: (1) even in competitive situation, the proposed evolutionary optimization method succeeds to find the ship routes of all alliances which can improve their own profits in comparison with those optimized by the conventional approach and those of actual routes, and (2) the ship routes generated by the proposed method have more anchor ports than the actual ship routes while keeping the ship constraints (e.g., the type of ships that each alliance has), which contributes to obtaining the appropriate resources as a good distributed coordination.