内外贸同船运输下长江经济带穿梭巴士网络优化

This paper optimizes the waterbus network in the Yangtze River Economic Belt with waterbuses engaging in domestic and foreign trade. The model of a hub-and-spoke network for waterbuses is developed to minimize the total transportation cost. The constraints include service frequency, multiple voyages, time window, and deadweight capacity. An adaptive large neighborhood algorithm including 5 removal operators and 2 inserting operators is proposed to solve the model. The domestic and foreign trade container transportation between Shanghai and the 19 ports of the Yangtze River of China are selected for empirical analysis. The results show that 23.6% of total transportation costs can be saved if waterbuses could engage in both domestic and foreign trade. Meanwhile, the average utilization of the waterbus capacity would increase to 87%. Waterbuses engaging in domestic and foreign trade increases the direct routes by 17%, which affects the network structure and turn round time. Establishing Nanjing Port and Taicang Port as hub ports in the downstream of Yangtze River Economic Belt would help to transfer domestic and foreign trade containers in the upstream and midstream of the region and save the total transportation costs by 6%~17% compared to only using one hub port.