Maritime transport plays an important role in global economic development but also inevitably faces increasing pressures from all sides, such as ship operating cost reduction and environmental protection. An ideal innovation to address these pressures is electric ships, which are more environmentally friendly than conventional manned fuel oil ships. The electric ship is in its early stages. To provide high-quality transportation services, the service network needs to be designed carefully. Therefore, this research simultaneously studies the location of charging stations, charging plans, route planning, ship scheduling, and ship deployment under service time requirements. The problem is formulated as a mixed-integer linear programming model with the objective of minimizing total cost comprised of charging cost, construction cost of charging stations, and fixed cost of ships. A case study using the data of the shipping network along the Yangtze River is conducted in order to evaluate the performance of the model. Valuable managerial insights are also derived from sensitivity analyses.

A huge amount of construction waste is generated in construction sites every day that needs to be transported by vehicle to disposal facilities for processing. Unlike in most typical transportation problems, once these vehicles are loaded with construction waste, they must travel directly to the disposal facility. Moreover, there are different types of construction waste that may require handling by different disposal facilities. In this paper, we develop a model and algorithm for identifying the optimal transportation routes specific to construction waste transportation. Our results can not only minimize the overall costs for both the logistics company and the contractor but also minimize the distance traveled, thus reducing urban traffic emissions.