Joint optimization of slot and empty container co-allocation for liner alliances with uncertain demand in the maritime logistics industry
Prof. Shaorui ZHOU, School of Intelligent Systems Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University
Date: 16 May 2025 (Friday)
Time: 10:30 – 12:00
Venue: E22-2002
Host: Prof. Zhaotong LIAN, Professor in Business Intelligence and Analytics
Abstract
With the growth traffic of containerized shipping worldwide, container liners have seen increasing cooperation. Slot co-allocation has drawn wide attention as a way of cooperation within liner alliances. However, due to the need for liner alliances to predict uncertain future demands to formulate empty container scheduling plans, empty container repositioning and co-allocation are essential but seldom considered. In response to this, this paper jointly optimizes the slot and empty container co-allocation issues by considering slot and empty container sharing. First, we proposed a two-stage stochastic programming model to minimize the total cost of the liner alliance. To solve the high-dimensional stochastic programming problem, we then proposed two new hybrid stochastic learning algorithms, which utilize the network structure while adaptively approximating the objective function by learning from historical data. Finally, we tested our algorithm in the real route data of the Ocean Alliance between South Asia and Southeast Asia. Computational results indicate that the proposed algorithms exhibit effective and efficient performance for joint optimization of slot and empty container co-allocation for liner alliances with uncertain demand, and some interesting managerial insights can be drawn from the rolling-horizon experiments.
Speaker
Dr. Shaorui ZHOU is currently an associate professor and doctoral supervisor at Sun Yat-sen University and a distinguished professor of the “Pengcheng Peacock Plan” in Shenzhen. He received his Ph.D. in Management Science and Engineering from Sun Yat-sen University, China, and his Ph.D. in Management Science from City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong. His research areas mainly include: 1) Supply chain management; 2) next-generation intelligent port and shipping systems; 3) low-altitude economy; 4) intelligent optimization algorithms. He has won the Doctoral Academic Award from the Ministry of Education of China. He is the chair of Low Altitude Economics at the World Transportation Conference (WTC). He has published more than 40 papers in the field of big data and artificial intelligence, with 6 papers selected as ESI highly cited papers. His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation of China, the Ministry of Education of China, and the Chinese Academy of Engineering.
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