Uncertainty in maritime ship routing and scheduling: A Literature review

The area of maritime transportation optimization has recently begun to achieve increasing success at solving large scale models, and industry is steadily adopting operations research-based models and algorithms. However, the parameters of models in the maritime domain, like many others, are beset with uncertainty. The travel times of ships, the handling times at port, the amounts of demand available at ports, fuel prices and more are all unknown and highly variable inputs to optimization methods. Recently, the maritime literature has started to address sources of uncertainty to provide higher quality decision making. We review this nascent area of the literature and provide a unifying view of different types of uncertainty across the main areas of maritime transport and varying problem types.