Abstract
Recently, it becomes more and more important to save fuel consumption on shipping for both economical and environmental reasons. For this purpose, there exist software-type methods like weather routing as well as hardwaretype methods like ship shape optimizing, which are very promising. In this paper, a ship scheduling optimization method, a kind of software-type method, is suggested. The method is based on mathematical programming techniques and so fast that it is appliable to maximal-fleet-sized coastal shipping scheduling problems in Japan, which seems to have been not well solvable by existing methods. A real case example shows the suggested method can optimize a 2-week scheduling of about 30 ships in 1 minuite, reducing fuel consumption by about 5 % compared to the original schedule made by human.
