An Immune Genetic Algorithm For Empty Container Dispatching Optimization And Its Simulation Analysis

As the representatives of the maritime advanced productivity's development, container transport is the most important means of transportation in the international trade. With the development of the international container transportation, the number of imported and exported containers is increasing greatly. Nevertheless, because of the unbalanced trade and the contradiction between the empty container's demand and supply, the international shipping market is facing a serious problem of how to dispatch empty containers. It is possible to move less empty containers by strengthening empty container management. And it is critical to perform rational and efficient empty container movement and distribution to decrease the numbers, reduce the costs, and shorten the transportation time. Whether the empty containers are reasonably distributed or not will exercise a great influence on shipping company.Firstly, on the basis of review of large amount of literatures, the paper introduces empty container dispatching from the reasons for the occurrence, characteristics and elements, etc and analyzes the substance of empty containers dispatching profoundly.On the base of the above analysis, a new empty container allocation process is proposed in an effort to reduce the allocation cost by analyzing the current empty container allocation process. Then, the empty container dispatch problem is formulated as nonlinear integer programming, the empty containers dispatching was interpreted with mathematical means. And an immune genetic algorithm (IGA) is developed to optimize empty container scheduling.Then, the investigation and projected demand in Qingdao port area are used to simulate and evaluate the proposed techniques. The empirical research demonstrates that significant cost and congestion reductions can be achieved, through such a new empty container allocation process.Finally, the paper summarizes all the work and proposes the inadequacy of the paper and the research directions in the future.