Random Environment, Shipping Containers Empty Container Allocation Problem Research

With the development of the container transportation and the spread of multimodal transport and Door to Door service model, container transportation can be found in various modes of transportation. Due to the factors, such as imbalance of trade and inefficient management, 20 percent containers in transportation are those empty containers that had to be disposed. Therefore, empty container disposition has become one of the most important subjects for study and discussion. Inefficient empty container disposition does not only waste plenty of the resources of empty containers, but also raise relevant costs, which will affect the economic efficiency of container transportation. The efficiency and performance of empty container deposition of a liner company will directly influence the quantities of the containers deployed on the service lines, and the quantities of the leasing containers, therefore act on the costs of container transport. Great efforts should be devoted on the study of empty container disposition in order to minimize the idleness and uneconomical movement of empty containers and maximize operating efficiency of the containers so that the gross costs of container transport could be reduced effectively.Nowadays, medium and small shipping companies in the world usually execute empty container disposition by experiences. In the academic fields, there are many researches focused on empty containers disposition. However, most of the researches are restricted in the road and railway transport fields, furthermore, when the models are established, random, dynamic and systematic characters have not been paid much attention to during the studies. In fact, many factors pertaining to empty containers disposition are of uncertainty. In the previous studies, even if the models established have taken into consideration the randomicity, most of them have reduced or simplified the randomicity, which are far different from the actual conditions.Under the protean background of shipping market, when analyzing empty containers disposition, this thesis pays more attention to the character of randomicity, and applies Markov Decision Processes (MDP) which included inthe subject of dynamic programming to model and imitate, at last, the thesis found some inherent rule about empty container disposition, this can provide container liner company with general rule in decision-making.The thesis is composed of 5 chapters. Chapter 1 makes a brief explanation of the significance of the research on empty container disposition, the current research status, and elucidates the researching way of the thesis. Chapter 2 makes an analysis of the origin of the problem, and the measures to deal with it. On the basis of a thorough research, Chapter 3 summarizes the characteristics of empty container disposition, analyzing the cost of empty container disposition from the point of economics. The emphasis of Chapter 4 is on the introduction of the method & procedure of the Markov Decision Processes (MDP) .establishing a Markov model of the empty container disposition in multi -harbor environment. Chapter 5 is the conclusion & prospect.In a word, the skeleton of the thesis is to establish a dynamic model of the business procedure of the empty container disposition, and make a systematic simulation of the model. The thesis provides us a new way to the theoretical research & practice of the empty container disposition problem, overcoming the disadvantage of the static analysis.