On 29th July, 2018, in Room A716 of the New Main Building, Professor Jianfeng Zheng, Dalian Maritime University, was invited to make a lecture on “Global hub location problem in liner shipping”. The lecture was hosted by professor Tian Qiong.
In liner shipping, many containers are often transshipped at the hub ports in order to benefit from economies of scale on transporting containers through the consolidation of containers. The location of hub ports is a very important problem that significantly affects decision making in container routing and ship routing, especially in liner hub-and-spoke (H&S) shipping network design. The reporter proposes a global hub location problem (GHLP) in liner shipping considering community structure. A two-stage optimization method is developed to solve the proposed problem. In the first stage, ports are partitioned into different communities by using a community detection algorithm. In the second stage, the reporter determines the location of hub ports for various communities, respectively. The optimal hub location solution for each considered community can be independently determined. Then the problem size can be sharply decreased. More importantly, it forms a community structure based optimal solution of the GHLP by combining the optimal hub location solutions for all considered communities. Numerical experiments are carried out to account for the effectiveness of the two-stage optimization method.
After the lecture, professor Zheng conducted further discussions with the audience.
