The Research Of Empty Container Allocation Model Under Uncertain Circumstances

As the global trade becomes more and more frequent, marine business has also obtained steady developments during the past ten years. Since the mid-1990's, as a new round of capacity expansion, supply exceeds demand in the shipping market and competition grows more and more vehement. In many shipping companies, the income of head operations decreased. So they began to concentrate on cost management one after another. In the various operating costs of a shipping company, container management cost has become the second largest cost only inferior to the cost of ports fee, accounts for nearly 20% of the total operation cost. At the same time, empty container allocation fee and container leasing fee which are highly related to the empty container allocation system account for 55% of the container management cost. As a result, it's central to the shipping company to organize the flow of empty containers effectively and raise the efficiency of empty container allocation.On the basis of analyzing the main characters of empty container allocation system and referring to the depending on personal experience actuality of empty container management of China shipping companies, this thesis detected the essential factors, that is, demand port and supply port, demand and supply of empty containers, stocks of empty containers, leasing containers and counting period of empty container allocation system, which mostly affect the empty container allocation system and confirmed the main purposes of the empty container allocation system. Differentiating between single type and multi types of containers, this paper established a series of ocean empty container allocation models grounded on the chance-constrained programming. Author put forward an effective way of handling uncertain data in the models and gave simulations to the empty container allocation models using Matlab.The structure of this paper is as follows: First chapter: introduce the social background of the empty container allocation problem, expatiate the main cause, theory value and practical meaning of studying thisproblem and analyze the research status in quo of the problem. Second chapter: describe the operating process of empty container allocation system and analyze its main characters, detect the essential factors which mostly affect the system, make qualitative analysis, enactment and judgement of the main purposes- minimum cost and consigner's satisfaction梠f the empty container allocation system. Third and forth chapter: establish a series of stochastic linear programming models grounded on the chance-constrained programming to handle the dynamic and uncertain character of the empty container allocation problem. Fifth chapter: give simulations to the established models using Matlab, validate the practical application of the model and find out the internal rules of the empty container allocation system.