1 | Introduction
Ship speed has merited consideration for as long as ships have been
employed as the vehicle for maritime transportation, in view of its
bearing on fuel costs, and consequently on the competitive position of
maritime tranportation vis-a-vis other modes of transportation, such as
road and rail. As Lavon and Shneerson1 have pointed
out, ship speed is considered in two distinct time instants of ship
lifetime: ship design and ship operation. The role of ship speed in ship
design is treated analytically by Jansson and
Shneerson2 in the context of liner shipping. The
concern of the work reported in this paper is confined to the role of
ship speed in ship operation, and as such, the focus of this paper is on
the role that ship speed plays in maritime transportation planning. As
stated by Chistiansen et.al.3, “maritime
transportation planning problems can be classified in the traditional
manner according to the planning horizon into strategic, tactical and
operational problems”. In view of the temporal variation of cargo
transport demand, port bunker fuel price variation, market competition
between ship operators, ship route planning, ship fleet sizing and
deployment, and increasing environmental concern with regard to
greenhouse gas emissions, the role of the ship speed optimisation
problem in maritime transportation planning has been been greatly
enhanced. This has resulted in the formulation of several ship speed
optimisation problem variants4,5, as well as the
development of a varirty of solution methods6.