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Energy groups are cargo owners with large amounts of energy sources (such as coal) to transport. To achieve a satisfactory tradeoff between the reliability requirements of the sea transportation process and the need to control the investment cost, they usually set up a self-owned fleet supplemented by a chartered fleet. This paper aims to investigate the best fleet structure and to evaluate the investment scheme under volatile circumstances in the shipping market.

The authors construct a mathematical model to determine the ratio of the self-owned fleet to the total fleet to minimize fleet operating costs. The volatility of both freight rates and oil prices is taken into consideration. The CPLEX solver is used to empirically analyze real data from an energy group in China, and the ship investment plan is evaluated considering the technical and economic feasibility.

If the ratio of the self-owned fleet to the total fleet is increased to the optimal of 90.40%, the total operating cost is reduced by 33.98%. Thus, the energy group should increase its capacity with a Panamax vessel of approximately 82,000 DWT. Purchasing a 5-year-old secondhand ship and building a new ship both have good investment return indicators.

For cargo owners engaging in transporting bulk cargo domestically in China, the suggested fleet ratio can provide a reference with a universal application scale, given the boundary economic conditions (including the volatility of freight rates and oil prices in the shipping market) in the paper.

This study investigated factors in the retail supply chains that were disrupted by the flow of the product distribution process from suppliers to retail stores and finally to consumers during the COVID-19 pandemic.

This qualitative study involved 12 key informants from two manufacturing industries and three retail industries in Indonesia. Meanwhile, the analysis of empirical conditions employed qualitative content analysis to discover facts of the inbound and outbound supplies in retail supply chains.

This study revealed high demands for certain products and a shift in consumer purchase trends during the pandemic screwed merchandising planning in retail stores. These conditions have brought continuous impacts on the production processes of manufacturing industries that also faced constrained raw material supplies. Container shortage in the global supply chain has increasingly aggravated the crisis of retail supply chains. 10;

Retailers and all related parties are ready to anticipate the changing of the supply chain by preparing strategies to overcome the crisis.

A contribution is made to the global retail supply chain in times of crisis and can serve as a framework for further research in each region.