Fleet Optimization in Ro-Ro Transportation: A Case Study from Turkiye

Abstract

Although maritime transport is the cheapest transportation mode, the management of ships is very costly. Ship management companies try to get the minimum cost and highest profit using ships effectively and efficiently. Therefore, they need to carry out shipment planning at the optimum level. The purpose of this research is to perform the optimum shipment planning of six ships in different sizes and capacities in a Ro-Ro fleet belonging to a ship management company operating in the Black Sea Region. On the basis of data obtained from the company that had problems in operating ships in its fleet effectively and efficiently, a model in A Mathematical Programming Language has been created, and this model has been solved with the GNU Linear Programming Kit, a mixed-integer program solver. Shipment planning has been conducted within the framework of six ships and a 1-year planning horizon, and profit maximization has been determined as the objective function.