Big Data Optimization in Maritime Logistics

Seaborne trade constitutes nearly 80% of the world trade by volume and is linked into almost every international supply chain. Efficient and competitive logistic solutions obtained through advanced planning will not only benefit the shipping companies, but will trickle down the supply chain to producers and consumers alike. Large scale maritime problems are found particularly within liner shipping due to the vast size of the network that global carriers operate. This chapter will introduce a selection of large scale planning problems within the liner shipping industry. We will focus on the solution techniques applied and show how strategic, tactical and operational problems can be addressed. We will discuss how large scale optimization methods can utilize special problem structures such as separable/ independent subproblems and give examples of advanced heuristics using divide-and-conquer paradigms, decomposition and mathematical programming within a large scale search framework. We conclude the chapter by discussing future challenges of large scale optimization within maritime shipping and the integration of predictive big data analysis combined with prescriptive optimization techniques.