Operation region selection for Panamax fleet based on support vector machine

This paper proposed a selection method of operation region for Panamax fleet based on the support vector machine. The influence of four Baltic Panamax indexes on the ship owners' choice of the operation region was considered, which is helpful for the ship owner to make policy decision of ships as reference. In addition, to verify the accuracy of the model, the operating informations of more than 2000 Panamax bulk carriers were collected to calculate by using the model in this paper. Result shows that the average relative errors of the Atlantic line and the Pacific line are about 4.05% and 9.06% respectively as compared to practical data.