Multiobjective Route Selection Based on LASSO Regression: When Will the Suez Canal Lose Its Importance?

With coronavirus disease 2019 reshaping the global shipping market, many ships in the Europe-Asia trades that need to sail through the Suez Canal begun to detour via the much longer route, the Cape of Good Hope. In order to explain and predict the route choice, this paper employs the least absolute shrinkage and selection operator regression to estimate fuel consumption based on the automatic identification system and ocean dataset and designed a multiobjective particle swarm optimization to find Pareto optimal solutions that minimize the total voyage cost and total voyage time. After that, the weighted sum method was introduced to deal with the route selection. Finally, a case study was conducted on the real data from CMA CGM, a leading worldwide shipping company, and four scenarios of fuel prices and charter rates were built and analyzed. The results show that the detour around the Cape of Good Hope is preferred only in the scenario of low fuel price and low charter. In addition, the paper suggests that the authority of Suez Canal should cut down the canal toll according to our result to win back the ships because we have verified that offering a discount on the canal roll is effective.