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Abstract

Maritime transportation is a highly complex transportation system that plays a pivotal role in international trade. Its low-cost and high-volume advantages have enabled it to cover most of the world’s cargo transportation. However, with the trend of global trade volume increasing almost every year and the recent congestion of ports due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the chaos in global supply chains not only increases operating costs for shippers but also makes it difficult for countries that rely heavily on port trade to plan for their ports’ future. To develop a strategic analytic tool to estimate container flow in liner shipping, we propose a stochastic user equilibriumbased network model. In the proposed model, shippers attempt to send their containers from the origin port to the destination port through a shipping network. The cost of traveling through nodes and links can vary according to the container flows. However, shippers are assumed to have perceptional error in cost when making decisions. In such a setup, the shippers hope to send their flow that benefits themselves the most without collaborating with others. The container flows resulting from the shippers’ decision can be used as the estimated flow pattern in liner shipping. With this framework, stakeholders can make strategic planning decisions based on the estimated flow in liner shipping. Numerical results with various problem instances are conducted to validate the proposed framework. Managerial insights and strategic impact are presented according to the results.

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