Research On The Empty Container Allocation Problem For Multimodal Transportation

With the rapid development of economy globalization and the sharp increase of the gross international trade, it is more and more obvious that container multi-model transportation plays an important role in the world trade. Along with this development, the empty container allocation becomes barrier of it. The cut of the cost influences not only the economy benefit but also the total cost of logistics of the society. The allocation and management of empty containers becomes an important subject of both academia and enterprises.The paper firstly reviews the previous research results of allocating empty containers, and uses an optimization model which combined the qualitative analysis and the quantitative analysis is constructed for empty container allocation, so that the optimization of routing, quantity and time is available.Secondly, the paper analyzes the subjective and objective reasons and practical problems in shipping enterprises, and systemically illustrates the optimization problems. Thirdly the paper makes further study on systematic objects and main influencing factors of allocating empty containers, which sets up a fundamental background for model construction.Finally, from the view of the shipping company, the paper sets up the mathematic model according with multimodal transportation containers and also makes some calculations and analysis. Meanwhile, the paper combines the satisfaction of the clients and gives some measurements on how to reduce the cost of allocating empty containers.The main contribution of the paper is that it concentrates on taking unbalance of supply and demand, time windows restriction and satisfaction of the clients into account in the process of setting up the mathematical model, improves the previous allocating model, builds the integral layout model, imitates systematically the models, which enhances the decision-making ability of whole allocation which is important to the development of container multimodal transportation.