Green Living
ISDN2001/2002: Second Year Design Project
How big should be the ferry ?
Bigger is always better, as people used to say. While it is always true when you are doing heavy lifting, when it comes to running a transportation service, it's not the golden rule.
Background
Building a sustainable ferry service network requires more than a vision and the technologies necessary to realize. It's a service, a business. Where there exist balance between ambition and reality, demand and supply, expenses and profits.
Mixed-Integer Linear Programming (MILP)
A mathematical optimization technique used to find the optimal outcome (i.e., profits). It deals with problems that involve both continuous and integer variables, while ensuring all constraints are satisfied. Popular MILP optimization methods include CPLEX, VNB, VNDS 0-1MIP, VINS
Constraints
The linear inequalities or equations or restrictions on the variables of a linear programming problem are called constraints. The conditions x ≥ 0, y ≥ 0 are called non-negative restrictions. In our case, as Kinesis is a service provider at its core, the main concern we are trying to address will be the profit, whereas the size of ships will be the one of the constraints since it limits the total capacity of Kinesis and in turn limits the possible income and other variables that affect the net profit such as purchasing costs and maintenance costs.
