Cruise itinerary schedule design
研究如何安排邮轮停靠港口的顺序和到离时间，以最大化港口效用价值减去燃油成本，并用动态规划方法求解，发现燃油价格对利润影响显著。
The Cruise Itinerary Schedule Design (CISD) problem determines the optimal sequence of a given set of ports of call (a port of call is an intermediate stop in a cruise itinerary) and the arrival and departure times at each port of call in order to maximize the monetary value of the utility at ports of call minus the fuel cost. To solve this problem, in view of the practical observations that most cruise itineraries do not have many ports of call, we first enumerate all sequences of ports of call and then optimize the arrival and departure times at each port of call by developing a dynamic programming approach. To improve the computational efficiency, we propose effective bounds on the monetary value of each sequence of ports of call, eliminating non-optimal sequences without invoking the dynamic programming algorithm. Extensive computational experiments are conducted and the results show that, first, using the bounds on the profit of each sequence of ports of call considerably improves the computational efficiency; second, the total profit of the cruise itinerary is sensitive to the fuel price and hence an accurate estimation of the fuel price is highly desirable; third, the optimal sequence of ports of call is not necessarily the sequence with the shortest voyage distance, especially when the ports do not have a natural geographic sequence.