Carbon emission reduction by forming liner alliances under maritime emission trading system

The maritime emission trading system (METS) is adopted to reduce ship CO2 emissions. This paper utilizes the forming of liner alliances under the METS to further reduce ship CO2 emissions. To investigate the effectiveness of forming liner alliances on ship CO2 emission reduction, we propose a liner ship operation planning problem for a liner alliance, which determines fleet deployment, slot co-chartering and emission permit trading. A multi-objective programming model is adopted to deal with the proposed problem. By considering three liner carriers, numerical results show that, i) the total ship CO2 emission reduction rate for these three liner carriers can be up to 13.5 %, by forming the liner alliance; ii) for any of these three liner carriers, the ship CO2 emission reduction rate can be up to 10 %∼15 %, by forming the liner alliance; iii) high fuel prices help liner alliances balance the trade-off between the operational cost and ship CO2 emissions.