If a shipper wants to transport his/her cargo to the destination port using liner shipping services, it first needs to contact the liner shipping company to book container slots through the e-commerce platform based on the estimated demand. Several weeks before a voyage of a liner ship, its company, which is also called a carrier, will open the available container slots on that liner ship for online booking. Slots on a container ship can be booked through an e-commerce platform.

Before actual transportation of goods, container slots booking is a main step. This study aims to analyze the optimal order quantity of container slots within the context of liner shipping.Īccording to the data published by Alphaliner in August 2021, 6,254 container ships are in operation globally, with a total capacity of 24,938,712 twenty-foot equivalent units (TEUs) (Alphaliner TOP 100, 2021), which shows that there is a huge demand of container liner shipping transportation. In contrast, ships involved in charter transportation do not have pre-established sailing routes and schedules as well as ports of call. Liner transportation is a service of transporting goods, mostly containerized goods (containers), by ships with regular routes and fixed schedules. Maritime transportation, which plays an important role in international trade (Psaraftis 2021), has two main operating modes: liner and charter. This study can help to manage and promote the online container booking systems in the liner shipping industry. In sensitive analysis, how different prices per container slot offered by the carrier would influence the reservation fee, the optimal order quantity of the shipper, and the expected profit of the carrier are explored and discussed. This study also aims to find the maximum profit for the carrier under the optimal order quantity of the shipper. Therefore, this study suggests that the shipper should pay reservation fee when booking container slots. In addition, uncertainties in the quantity of container slots booking made by the shipper might cause revenue loss to the carrier and low utilization of ship capacity in the daily operations of liner shipping services. To address this issue, this study develops a Newsvendor model to find the optimal order quantity of container slots for the shipper. However, one problem in the booking process is that the actual demand is uncertain, resulting in mismatch between the required demand and the booked quantity. In the liner shipping industry, if a shipper wants to transport its cargo by container ships, it first needs to contact a carrier to book container slots based on the estimated transportation demand.

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