Slot Allocation Models For Container Shipping With Revenue Management

During the near twenty years, along with the transportation technology rapid development, the container shipping industry develop very fast and it become the main transportation way. Nevertheless the demand exceeds supply in the market. With the current fiercely competitive market freight rates cannot be increased, Container Company faces big challenge. Therefore, shipping company should use revenue management (RM) method to allocate the capacity of the ship. Revenue management can be defined as selling the right product to right customer at the right time for the right price to maximize the profits of the company. It based on the demand forecast and adopts the inventory control method. It integrates the subdividing the market, the demand forecast and product pricing to make the potential profits in the market to the realization income maximization.Based on the related study, the thesis analyzes feasibility of the application in container shipping industry. Container shipping industry belongs to the typical service industry; it is feasible to use RM in this industry. Container shipping industry also has the characteristics for the application of RM, such as relatively fixed and perishable capacity, advance booking, high fixed costs and lower marginal costs and so on. However due to the difference between airline passenger industry and container shipping industry, the RM methods successfully applied in the airline industry can't be copied to the container shipping industry. The thesis analyzes slot allocation characteristics of the container shipping industry. Based on the above analyses, a stochastic programming model is proposed on the container slot allocation. The chance-constrained programming method is used in solving the model. In order to illustrate this slot allocation model, the thesis applied the model to a container shipping company. The result shows the model run well.The thesis analyze the following factors which are influence the slot allocation, reposition of empty container; rent of empty container; the route of shipping the container; network; stochastic demand. Then the thesis designs the model. The research results of this paper are supplementary to quantitative study on revenue management for the container shipping industry and will also play an active role in the process of enterprises decision-making.