Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: With the surge in global maritime trade of new energy vehicles (NEVs), the roll-on/roll-off (Ro-Ro) shipping market faces a severe supply–demand imbalance, pushing shipping rates to persistently high levels. To tackle this challenge, NEV manufacturers and other automakers have begun establishing their own Ro-Ro fleets, creating an urgent need for optimized operational scheduling of these proprietary fleets. Against this context, this study focuses on optimizing the operational scheduling of automakers’ self-owned Ro-Ro fleets. Under the premise of deterministic automobile export transportation demands, a mixed-integer programming model is developed to minimize total fleet operational costs, with decision variables covering vessel port call sequence/selection, port loading and unloading quantities, and voyage speeds. A genetic algorithm is designed to solve the model, and the effectiveness of the proposed approach is validated through a real-world case study. The results demonstrate that the optimization method generates clear, actionable scheduling schemes for self-owned Ro-Ro fleets, effectively helping automakers refine their maritime logistics strategies for proprietary fleets. This study contributes to the field by focusing on automaker-owned Ro-Ro fleets and filling the research gap in cargo-owner-centric scheduling, providing a practical tool for automakers’ overseas logistics operations.
Source: Sustainability
DOI: 10.3390/su17198683
Authors: Feihu Diao, Yijie Ren, Shanhua Wu
Institution: Ningbo University
Language: English
Topic: Maritime Ports and Logistics
Subfield: Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering
Field: Engineering
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $2,896
Awards: G5441983584, G5547837993, G6123828633
OpenAlex ID: W4414559162