Ships' response strategies to port disruptions caused by hurricanes.

This paper studies ships' operational proactive strategies during the entire process of port disruptions due to environmental factors such as hurricanes. For the first time, the incompleteness and uncertainty of information, and the characteristics of port disruptions are considered. The problem is modeled as a nonhomogeneous Markov decision process (MDP), where different operational actions, such as sailing speed adjustment, handling rate adjustment, and port sequence adjustment are considered. The rolling horizon decision-making approach and a PSO-GA-based hybrid evolutionary algorithm are combined to solve the model. The results show that compared to the strategy without planned schedule adjustments, cost-saving up to 78.34% can be achieved by simultaneously adjusting the sailing speed, cargo handling rate, and port sequence. Counter-intuitively, we find that observing more complete hurricane information or having accurate forecasts does not always conducive to better decision-making. We also find the integration of multiple response strategies yields synergistic benefits. These findings will deepen our understanding of the impact of port disruptions and provide theoretical support for the decision-making of ship's response strategies. • The characteristics of port disruptions, and the incompleteness and uncertainty of information are considered. • A nonhomogeneous Markov decision process (MDP) is developed to model a ship's real-time state-based response strategies. • A rolling horizon approach combined with a PSO-GA based hybrid evolutionary algorithm is proposed to solve the model. • Observing more complete information or having accurate forecasts does not always conducive to better decision-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]