In liner shipping industry, the transportation service is given on a regular basis using containerships. Once a route for a ship has been determined, it is not likely to be changed for a certain period of time. Therefore liner shipping managers should consider as many factors as possible to make right decisions on the ship routes. The larger a liner fleet is, the more complicated the routing decision grows and the greater its effect becomes.
Many shipping companies these days have challenging opportunities from growing cargo demands and new hub-ports available for possible ports of visits. The purpose of this study is to develop a management science model for ship routing strategies for a liner fleet. This study considers various ship sizes and assumes that no two routes are assigned to a single ship. The model has been developed to be a mixed integer program with binary variables. Usual instances of the model can be solved to find the optimal solutions using ordinary commercial software.