The Emission Control Areas (ECAs) established by the International Maritime Organization are beneficial to reduce sulphur emissions in maritime transportation but bring a significant increase in operating cost for shipping liners. Low sulphur emissions are required when ships berth or sail within ECAs. It is an irreversible trend that green technologies such as scrubbers and shore power will be implemented in maritime shipping industry. However, literature lacks a quantitative decision methodology on the green technology adoption for fleet deployment in a shipping network in the con- text of ECAs. This study proposes a nonlinear mixed integer programming model to optimally determine fleet deployment along routes, timetables, sailing speeds on all legs, and cargo allocation among routes for each origin-destination pair. A three- phase heuristic is also developed to solve this problem. Numerical experiments with real-world data are conducted to validate the effectiveness of the proposed model and the efficiency of the three-phase heuristic. Some managerial implications are also outlined on the basis of the numerical experiments.
Lu Zhen is a Professor and Associate Dean in the School of Management at Shanghai University. He got his B.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Shanghai Jiaotong University in 2003 and 2008, respectively. He worked at National University of Singapore as a postdoctoral scholar before joining Shanghai University in 2011. His research interests include optimization in port and shipping management, logistics, and supply chain, and knowledge management. He has published 69 SCI and SSCI journals including Transportation Science, Transportation Research Part B, Naval Research Logistics, and IISE Transactions. He is the PI of 15 projects including four at the national level. He has served as an associate editor/editor of four SCI/SSC journals and two EI journals, and the Fellow of the Operational Research Society (U.K.).