Research On Redistribution Problems Of Empty Containers Based-on The Integral Process Of Ocean-Land Cotransport

The imbalanced amount and the types of containers export and import in the different areas of the world, which incurred by the international trade imbalance, force the empty containers to be redistributed. A mass of distribution cost occurs with the process. The benefit which the ship company get by trying their best to provide loading service will be wasted by the absurd empty containers redistribution cost, and the empty containers redistribution problem becomes a pop research topic around the world.Based on the empty containers redistribution problems caused by the international trade imbalance, this paper from the perspective of the integral process of ocean-land cotransport analyzes the cost in the empty containers redistribution process, including transport cost in land-carriage, transport cost in shipping, storage cost, rent cost, penalty cost for the delay. How these kinds of cost effect to the total redistribution cost is also been discussed. The purposes of the paper are to make some advices for the empty containers redistribution policy choice to the ship company.At the same time, empty containers redistribution cost is considered in the overbooking policy, and an optimal model of overbooking is also conducted to optimize the ship company management from the view of revenue management. The following are the main work of the paper:Firstly, this paper analyzes and describes the empty containers redistribution process between different areas, which is caused by the imbalanced international trade. The empty container redistribution integral process of ocean-land cotransport include three processes: collecting redundant empty containers from the yards to the port which the yards belongs to, transporting empty container between ports by shipping, distributing the empty containers from the port to the destined yards by land transportation.Secondly, according to the demand uncertainty of the empty containers, the demand is divided into the confirmed bargin demand and the stochastic batch demand. Chance constrain is used to conduct empty containers redistribution models based on satisfaction of the uncertain demand.Thirdly, according to the time uncertainty characters of the land-carriage transport, time window constrain is considered to conduct the hard time window redistribution model based on the confirmed transport time and the soft time window redistribution model based on the time uncertain of transport.Finally, according to the effort of the empty container redistribution cost to the total cost of overbooking, an overbooking model is built up based on the empty containers redistribution process. The goal of the model is to minimize the sum of the oversale cost and the poilage cost, and two sets of policies are also conducted when the overbooked loaded container shows: reducing empty contain shipping transport to fulfil the loaded container transport demand and refusing to reduce empty contain shipping transport,accepting the oversale cost.From the view of the ship company, the paper applies operational research theory, uncertainty theory, optimization theory, system simulation theory to study the empty container redistribution.The research provides some theory guidance and method support for the the cost optimization of the ship company management.