Land And Maritime Allocation Of Empty Containers Optimization Studies

The container is an advanced and normative way of transportation. With the rapid development of Container transportation in these years, the conflict between providing and demanding is becoming more and more noticeable. In some international sea routes the percentage of empty containers even is higher than 25%. It is surveyed that the total cost of empty container disposition in the world has exceeded 30 billion dollars. Since the cost of empty containers disposition is so large, the shipping companies have to put emphasis on how to reasonable dispose empty containers and decrease the cost of disposition. Then, the management of empty container disposition becomes one of the important problems that urge to be solved.This thesis, analyzing the system of empty container disposition and investigating several disposition optimization modals, studies the empty container disposition of land-carriage, ocean shipping and intermodel, and searches after some strategies and quantitative means that are propitious to empty container disposition. The purpose is to provide helps for the decisions of shipping companies in empty container disposition.Firstly, this thesis adopts the SWOT methods to analyze the advantage and disadvantage factors of the shipping companies and introduces some strategies of empty container disposition for the shipping companies. The strategies include the alliance among the shipping companies, the cooperation between the shipping companies and the container renting companies, the cooperation between the shipping companies and the container manufactory, the choice of containers, the improvement for information system of container management and so on.Secondly, land-carriage empty container disposition models, which are Integer Programming, are established. The models take into account the storage cost, the left unused cost of shipper own containers and the quantity restrictions to the containers for renting. Two kinds of empty container disposition models are presented and the results of the models are compared.Thirdly, the ocean shipping empty container disposition models, which is Integer Programming, are established. The models take into account the loadingand discharge cost, the left unused cost of shipper own containers, the cost of discarded loaded containers, the direction restriction of the empty container disposition and the quantity restriction of the containers for renting. Two kinds of empty container disposition models are presented and the results of them are compared.Fourthly, the land-carriage empty container disposition models are compared with the ocean shipping empty container disposition models and some methods that are helpful to reduce the cost of empty container disposition are summarized.Finally, the intermodal transportation empty container disposition model, which is Integer Programming, is established. The model takes into account the loading and discharge cost, the left unused cost of shipper own containers, the cost of discarded loaded containers, the direction restriction of the empty container disposition and the quantity restriction of the containers for rent. The model is a combination of the land-carriage empty container disposition models and the ocean shipping empty container disposition models.The followings are originated in this thesis: the land-carriage, ocean shipping and intermodal transportation empty container disposition models, which are Integer Programming, are established. The left unused cost of shipper own containers and the cost of discarded loaded containers are presented. The loading and discharge cost, the direction restriction of the empty container disposition and the quantity restriction of the containers for rent are taken into account. The results of two kinds of empty container disposition models are compared.This thesis, applying the concept of system, capitalizes on the optimization technology to study the empty container disposition. It provides some valuable suggestions for the shipping companies.