Cooperation Management In Container Transportation Service Chain Based On Carrier

With the further development of international trade, containershipping industry is becoming more important in the world economy,which is expected that70%of global trade will be done by the containertransport at by2015. The container transportation service chain aremainly composed of shippers, freight forwarders, carriers, the containerleasing company, and also the spot market, ports, depots and thegovernment. And the relationship among them is complicated. Firstly,they often make the optimal solution from their own point of view,because they are all independent and selfish. So, the joint effect of doublemarginalization and the information asymmetry in the decentralizedcontainer transportation chain have caused the inefficiency of thecontainer transportation service chain. Secondly, the container as animportant resource in the container transportation service chain cannot beused effectively. In the decentralized container transportation chain, thecontainer capacity planning can only be made by the independentoperators, which always ignore the comprehensive planning of thetransportation chain, like sharing the empty containers among owners.The consequences are: the high rate of empty containers, the waste ofcapacity and resources, and the low profit margin.Therefore, the different cooperation methods are proposed toimprove the profit of the container transportation service chain by thecontainer capacity planning. The research analyses the container transport service system operation mechanism: the coordination with otheroperators by the container capacity planning, the carrier can improveprofit more efficiently. The paper not only involves game theory andoptimization theory, but also concerns about the microeconomics andfinance. Standing by the side of the carrier, some interdisciplinaryresearch are done, that is the coordination mechanisms between the rentalcompany and the carrier, the carrier and the freight forwarder, the spotmarket. The brief summarize of the paper is as follows.(1) The cooperation problem between the carrier and the containerleasing company. The concept of financial options is introduced in to thesingle-period two-stage system. The decision processes are divided intotwo stages. Stage1: The carrier places the initial leasing order andpurchases options at the first stage according to the forecastedinformation; Stage2: Options exercised decision is made based on theupdated demand information towards that at the first stage. That is to say,the carrier can exercise a part of options or all of the options at the secondstage. The problems are formulated as nonlinear programs withconstraints, afterwards, the inductions are made and correspondinganalysis is done.(2) The cooperation problem between carrier, the downstreamforwarder and the spot market. The heterogeneous cooperation model isdeveloped to improve the profit of both carrier and forwarder. However,the capacity management and coordination model is hardly to be solvedwhen the spot market is involved. So, we introduce the system dynamicsas a critical instrument into the research and simulate dynamism of thecontainer transportation service system. Basing on information economics,a highly efficient two-stage empty container capacity planning and allocation mechanism is built.(3) Based on the evolutionary game theory, some analysis on thecontainer transportation system with multi-carrier are considered.Monitoring mechanism for the proposed container regional shipping isproved to improve the profit of the carriers. The result shows that themechanism established in this chapter, not only can improve thecollaboration between carriers, but also help to achieve long-termequilibrium.Based on the different disciplines, the paper presents the differentmodels from the carriers' perspective, which use the containers quantityas the decision variable. Finally, the numerical example shows that alldecision strategies can effectively increase the profit of carrier.