Fleet route selection prediction problem based on support vector machine

Bulk shipping transport is an important part of ocean transportation. One of the most important aspects for bulk ship owners is to make choices about the ship’s operational area for the next planning period. In this article, based on the Baltic Supermax Index and historical decision data of different companies, the support vector machine model is used to predict the dry bulk carrier route selection, which provides a solution to this problem. The numerical results show that the model and the algorithm proposed in the paper can well work and can achieve good precision. Via comparative analysis, we prove that the model we proposed in this article has better performance than some other common methods in the research area. The proposed model would support dry bulk shipping company in route choice so as to balance the profit and potential opportunity when making choice for ships’ route selection