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This paper aims to conduct a review on cruise shipping and the cruise shipping industry. The current trends are analyzed for the industry, showing that this industry is still young and has great potential to boom. Meanwhile, the Asia market is the fastest growth region among the global, to which increasing cruise ships are repositioned by major cruise lines. However, for such a promising industry, the literature review on some state-of-the-art research works suggests that the research works that have been conducted for the cruise shipping are quite limited, and the majority of the works belongs to empirical and descriptive studies, which does not provide optimization-based quantitative analysis on some operation planning problems.

This paper conducts a review on cruise shipping and the cruise shipping industry.

In reality, there are some important operation planning problems faced by cruise lines or cruise ships, and four of them are addressed in this paper in response to the fast growing trend. The addressed operation planning problems are cruise fleet management, cruise ship deployment, cruise itinerary design and cruise service planning.

The importance and the attention for the research on the problems are also elaborated in the paper.

The purpose of this study is to analyze the effect of China’s potential domestic emission control area (DECA) with 0.1 per cent sulphur limit on sulphur emission reduction.

The authors calculate the fuel cost of a direct path within the DECA and a path that bypasses the DECA for ships that sail between two Chinese ports in view of the DECA. Ships adopt the path with the lower cost and the resulting sulphur dioxide (SO₂) emissions can be calculated. They then conduct sensitivity analysis of the SO₂ emissions with different values of the parameters related to sailing distance, fuel price and ships.

The results show that ships tend to detour to bypass the DECA when the distance between the two ports is long, the ratio of the price of low sulphur fuel and that of high sulphur fuel is high and the required time for fuel switching is long. If the time required for fuel switching is less than 12 h or even 24 h, it can be anticipated that a large number of ships will bypass the DECA, undermining the SO₂ reduction effect of the DECA.

This study points out the size and shape difference between the emission control areas in Europe and North America and China’s DECA affects ships’ path choice and SO₂ emissions.

The purpose of this study is to propose a mathematical optimization model to solve the yacht mooring area re-allocation problem (YMARP). The objective of the problem is to allow the maximum number of yachts to be moored at their ideal mooring areas.

In this paper, the YMARP is introduced, formally defined and discussed. The authors develop a 0-1 integer programing optimization model for the problem, which can be solved efficiently using off-shelf solvers. The performance of the model is tested on extensive numerical experiments.

The results of the numerical experiments demonstrate that the proposed model can solve the YMARP very efficiently using off-shelf solvers like CPLEX. In particular, problems with up to 30,000 yachts and 400 mooring areas can be solved to optimum within 30 s.

This study is one of the preliminary studies to consider problems arising in yacht management in a quantitative manner. The proposed model has three main merits. First, it enables the government to better manage yachts and mooring areas. Second, with more yacht owners assigned with ideal mooring areas, the model helps reduce the traveling time of the yacht owners to yacht mooring areas. Third, by reducing the traveling time of the yacht owners, the model contributes to lessening the traffic burden in cities.