Joint Fleet Deployment and Ship Scheduling for Cost-Efficiency Optimization via a Two-Level Metaheuristic Algorithm

Maritime transportation remains one of the most capital-intensive industries, where efficient vessel utilization critically impacts operational cost reduction and project punctuality. This paper addresses the challenge of simultaneously optimizing fleet deployment and ship scheduling, which mutually influences each other, aiming to minimize the total cost and vessel vacancy under complex operational constraints. To solve this computationally demanding problem, we propose a two-level metaheuristic-based optimization method for unsupervised exploration of the most time-efficient and cost-saving strategy with reduced computational expense. Extensive numerical experiments using simulated data validate the effectiveness of our approach, demonstrating its ability to achieve near-optimal solutions while maintaining tractable execution times.