As a key point in the international supply chain, the functioning of port and shipping systems is based on the complex, spatiotemporal coordination of ship navigation and internal resources within the port. This paper first abstracts a multiport network as a directed weighted graph, formalizing the scheduling problem as finding the path of minimum characteristics such that all the constraints are satisfied in the graph. In order to solve the problem of state space explosion, the model of multi-dimensional dynamic program based on time, location and cargo loading status is established. Efficient solution strategies, which use both time window feasibility pruning and state pruning, are devised to approximate the global optimum in an acceptable time frame. The simulation of a east Asian shipping network was the basis of the experiment. In a large-scale case study (15 ports), the experiment resulted in optimized performance with a total cost of US601, 300; 82. 8 percent ship time utilization rate; and 91. 6 percent port operation punctuality rate. This offers a good solution for intricate multi-port shipping scheduling with global optimization performance and solution feasibility.
Xie et al. (2026) studied this question.