Institute of Transportation, MOTC

　　Container transit path planning is a vital issue in which liner carriers have to integrate many inner resources. According to the rotation and schedule of a carrier’s lines, this issue is to arrange the suitable delivery routes for all cargoes satisfying the carrier conditions of each origin-destination port pair. The transit path might require transshipment between lines. This research follows the properties of the strategic planning problem to design a network graph for the formulation of the mathematical programming model. This model considers the trade-off between delivered costs, transit time and slot capacities with system optimization. The results can obtain an optimized transit route for each port pair and the transshipped ports for those required port pairs. This research conducts a case study courtesy of a company operating Asian short sea services. The performance of solving by optimization commercial package CPLEX is quite good. The minimized total delivered costs, unit delivered cost, transit time and transshipped time of containers for each port pair can also be discovered.