Vladislav Maras

Determining Optimal Transport Routes of Inland Waterway Container Ships

The transport routes of chartered container ships or tows in inland waterway transport are investigated in this paper. The optimal values of parameters that influence the efficient utilization of these ships or tows or business success of a container shipping company with available container ships of this kind in its fleet are also determined. These parameters include size of container ship on a certain route, number of containers loaded or unloaded at each port on a route, ship speed, realized revenues, costs and profit, and others. The proposed model helps in evaluating whether an inland waterway container ship or tow should be chartered or not. The optimal values of all parameters, based on the developed mixed-integer linear programming model, are determined by using LINGO, specialized software for mathematical programming.

Routing of barge container ships by mixed-integer programming heuristics

Abstract We investigate the optimization of transport routes of barge container ships with the objective to maximize the profit of a shipping company. This problem consists of determining the upstream and downstream calling sequence and the number of loaded and empty containers transported between any two ports. We present a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) formulation for this problem. The problem is tackled by the commercial CPLEX MIP solver and improved variants of the existing MIP heuristics: Local Branching, Variable Neighborhood Branching and Variable Neighborhood Decomposition Search. It appears that our implementation of Variable Neighborhood Branching outperforms CPLEX MIP solver both regarding the solution quality and the computational time. All other studied heuristics provide results competitive with CPLEX MIP solver within a significantly shorter amount of time. Moreover, we present a detailed case study transportation analysis which illustrates how the proposed approach can be used by managers of barge shipping companies to make appropriate decisions and solve real life problems.

Future priorities for a climate-friendly transport: A European strategic research agenda toward 2030

ABSTRACT Research is a key factor for a successful reduction in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from transport. This article summarizes the main results of REACT, a project cofinanced by the European Commission, which aimed to develop a European Strategic Research Agenda for low GHG transport. A literature review and a multistage expert consultation process were used to map technological and nontechnological research areas and evaluate them according to different criteria (i.e., GHG emissions reduction, cost-efficiency, feasibility, time frame of research stages). We consulted the research agendas of the European Technologies Platforms on transport and current EU research programs. Expert opinions were collected through web forms, interviews, and participation in structured workshops. The REACT Research Agenda identified the following research priorities for a more climate-friendly transport system by 2030: (a) in the short term, cost-effective solutions consist of (1) more efficient, lighter vehicles with advanced internal combustion engines, (2) reducing road transport demand and (3) fostering GHG emission legislation; (b) in the medium/long term, the focus shifts toward (1) electric vehicles and hydrogen, (2) Intelligent Transport Systems, and (3) spatial planning and economic and social measures to reduce transport demand. In addition, one of the main findings identified strong links between technology research and planning, social sciences, and economy.

Hub-and-Spoke Networks to Increase the Scope of Container-on-Barge Transport: Performance Analysis

Container-on-barge transport has developed successfully in Europe during the past two decades, but this transport business primarily focused on maritime container flows and has therefore developed as a typical hinterland transport system. Accessibility and sustainability present a great challenge to increase the container-on-barge market share within as well as outside hinterland corridors. The latter implies the development of intermodal barge transport of cargo that has no direct relation with the seaport, which would be a completely new market for container-on-barge transport. A new type of container-on-barge-services, that is, hub-and-spoke services, can pave the way to open up this continental freight market for container-on-barge transport. A cost model is used to demonstrate the potential performance of such barge services compared with traditional services. The results of the analysis indicate that the most promising strategy to develop hub-and-spoke services is that the well-developed hinterland barge services become a part of the hub-and-spoke network. In this way, the continental cargo flows can be bundled with maritime cargo flows. The effectiveness of hub-and-spoke services, however, depends on several conditions, in particular, the network configuration (i.e., transport volumes, sailing distances, quality of waterways) as well as the type and performance of container exchange in the hub.

Combinatorial Formulation Guided Local Search for Inland Waterway Routing and Scheduling

We investigate the optimization of inland transport routes of barge container ships with the objective to maximize the profit of a shipping company. This problem consists of determining the upstream and downstream calling sequence and the number of loaded and empty containers transported between any two ports. We present Combinatorial as well as Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) formulation for this problem. We propose to combine these two approaches with an aim to generate efficient heuristic to solve considered problem. The proposed mixed-formulation Local Search (MIX-LS) represents good basis for implementation of LS-based meta-heuristic methods and we presented Multi-start Local Search (MLS) within this framework. To compare the proposed approach with the state-ofthe-art Mixed Integer Programming (MIP) based heuristics we run all methods within a predefined time limit. It appears that pure local search is comparable with the MIPbased heuristic methods, while MLS outperforms all methods regarding both criteria: solution quality and running time.