  The vast majority of world trade is carried by the sea shipping industry and
petroleum is still the major energy source. To reduce greenhouse gas emissions,
it is an urgent need for both industry and government to promote green
shipping. To move shipping towards a more environmentally and financially
sustainable future, we consider to develop an integrated fleet deployment and
bunker management model in this paper. The fleet deployment refers to the
decisions on which ships to operate on which route, at what speed and what
cargos to be transported. The bunker management refers to the decision on which
ships to bunker on which port and at what volume. A more realistic fuel
consumption function with considering not only cruise speed but also freight
tonnage on board is adopted in the proposed optimization model, which can
further improve its effectiveness in practice. An efficient algorithm termed
"Most Promising Area Search" (MPAS) is developed afterwards to solve the
corresponding mixed integer programming problem, which can guarantee to
converge to a local optimal solution. The benefits of the integrated model and
the computational performance of the MPAS are illustrated by numerical examples
and a case study.
