It’s inevitable that the price of commodities in the eastern part of Indonesia is much higher than in the west. The unbalance economic growth between these two parts of Indonesia, might be one of the reason. Hence, the main trade activities happen mostly in the west, especially in Java island which could be called as the center of this country.
According to Meeuws and Bahagia, Indonesia as an archipelago country is dependent to maritime logistics on transporting goods and transportation. But unfortunately the performance of logistic in Indonesia is still poor. Also, the cost of logistics in Indonesia is still high. Until 2011, the cost of logistics is equal to 24.64% of Indonesia’s GDP.
Liner shipping company, as the provider of maritime logistics services, is looking for technology for optimizing their cost planning in operating and enhancing their fleets. The purpose of this plan is to make the capacity of their fleets matches the demand of container. The main goal for every company is of course to gain maximum profit. But the high of logistic cost and the unbalance trade activities in Indonesia might be the problem for liner shipping company to achieve that.
In liner shipping there are three different time-horizon levels. There are strategic level, tactical level, and operational level. The strategic level has the longest horizon and it involves determining the optimal fleet. The tactical planning level is done once in the several months and it involves constructing ship schedules. The shortest term decision level is the operational level. It involves determining the optimal allocation of cargo.
Previously there has been a research on Indonesia’s maritime logistic, especially in liner shipping made by Meijer and Van Rijn from Netherland. The purpose of their research is to gain maximum profit by optimizing liner shipping network design in Indonesia. But their research did not consider demand in the future (multi-period planning). Multi-period planning is crucial for liner shipping company in planning and developing the maritime logistics business.
SEMS researchers see this as an opportunity for our research. Therefore we make a research on multi-period liner shipping network design in Indonesia. The purpose is for the liner shipping company to gain maximum profit by optimizing their network design. In doing so, there are given conditions and scenarios in order to acknowledge which scenario suits best for multi-period planning. The outcome of this research is also to design the optimum logistics network which involves, which routes to be used, how many ships have to be allocated, and the cargo allocation.
This Research is conducted by Mellianna Fiannnita Purba, Komarudin and Armand Omar Moeis.
