Container transshipment via a regional hub port: A case of the Caribbean Sea region

The Caribbean Sea region connects the Panama Canal and the Atlantic Ocean, and container transshipment is the main factor in promoting the development of the container port market in this region. The strategic goal of port development in most countries in this region is to improve transshipment potential and become competitive for container transshipment. This paper explores a special kind of the hierarchical hub location problems. Namely, we investigate container transshipment via a regional hub port within the Caribbean Sea region, which determines the regional hub port location and feeder port allocation in this region. Two mixed-integer linear programming models with single allocation and multiple allocation are proposed for our problem. Numerical results imply that Jamaica or Bahamas is the best choice for a regional hub port in the Caribbean Sea region.