Study On Railway Empty Container Reposition

With the development of our national economy and railway infrastructure construction, the container transport has entered into the high speed development period contributing the characteristics of rapidness, safety, economy and convenience. But owing to resource distribution, unbalanced regional economic development, urban layout and other factors, there are many differences in container cargo distribution and flows direction so that the container flows are unbalanced in space and time. Consequently, the problem about empty and loaded containers’allocation is proposed. The method and level of empty containers reposition will affect directly the transport cost and the efficiency of container cars and resources. Thus, research on empty containers allocation is great significant to transport enterprise.First of all, the paper gives a systemic description on the allocation of empty containers and analyzes the insufficiency of present railway empty container reposition, combining closely with the features and current situation of rail container transport. And in view of the existing phenomenon empty container reposition only considering transport ignoring the use of empty container, puts forward a new empty reposition method which is based on customer value and transport cost. This approach’s main ideas derives from the modern enterprise customer relationship management theory, empty containers are allocated according to customers’value.The strategy based on’value-cost’starts from studying on railway container customer value, establishes railway container customer value assessment index system, and assesses the customer value by means of Fuzzy-AHP. On this basis, the Hierarchical cluster analysis is applied to implement customer segmentation by adopting SPSS software. Then, in accordance with above conclusion, empty container reposition modal is established based on ’value-cost’strategy and the corresponding method for solving is also given. Finally, a simulation example is applied to simulate the method so as to prove its advantage.Through the above research, the paper concludes that the railway empty reposition strategy is compliance with modern enterprise management and more significant than considering the minimization of transport cost purely, integrating empty reposition and market management closely and reflecting the characteristics of modern marketing.