Container shipping is one of the most important transport modes in international trade. For a large-scale container shipping network, an optimisation model is proposed to minimise the total shipping cost of container flow. Considering the directional property of the container shipping process, a steering vector search pattern is incorporated in a Max-Min Ant System (MMAS) solving algorithm, and an orthogonal array method is adopted in parameter settings. In numerical experiments, a traditional ant colony algorithm and an MMAS algorithm based on a steering vector search pattern are used respectively to optimise the network of five node scales. The results show that a steering vector search pattern can speed up the computation process and improve the optimisation effect.
