Institute of Transportation, MOTC

　　In order to offer better service and maintain competitiveness, most major shipping carriers have “networklized” their containership routes, and this is the main cause of the container routing problem. This container routing problem is to determine optimal paths for each set of containers with the same origin and destination (O-D), under the available capacities offered by containership routes and at the minimum overall costs. An optimization model is formulated for this container routing problem for shipping carriers. Essentially, this model is a multicommodity network flow problem. Promising test results from this model are obtained, which have shown the model’s feasibility. We hope that this model can be applied in the real world industry and serve as a helpful tool for shipping carriers in solving their container routing problem.