Vessles in the world merchant fleet generally operate in either liner or bulk trade. The supply and the demand trend of general cargo ship are both on the ebb, however, those trend of tankers and containers are in slight ascension. Oil tankers are so far the largest single vessel type in the world fleet and the tanker market is often cited as a textbook example of perfect competition. Some shipping statistics in recent years show that there has been a radical fluctuation in spot charter rate under easy charterer's market. This implys that the proper scheduling of tankers under spot market fluctuation has the great potential of improving the owner's profit and economic performance of shipping. This paper aims at developing the TS-DSS(Decision Support System for Tanker Scheduling) in the context of the importance of scheduling decisions. The TS-DSS is defined as the DSS based on the optimization models for tanker scheduling. The system has been developed through the life cycle of systems analysis, design, and implementation to be user-friendly system. The performance of the system has been tested and examined by using the data edited under several tanker scheduling scenarios and thereby the effectiveness of TS-DSS is validated satifactorily. The authors conclude the paper with the comments on the need of appropriate support environment such as data-based DSS and network system for succesful implementation of the TS-DSS.

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