Cargo Allocation Problems Of Container Multimodal Transportation Based On Supernetwork

With the continuous development of transportation industry in our country, the convenient and high-efficiency container multimodal transportation has developed rapidly too during the recent years. Container transportation has changed from traditional port operation, port to port, station to station, to the development of an integrated and comprehensive network. More and more attention is paid to the systematization and network of the overall container multimodal transportation.In the container transportation system, there’s a collecting process which the containers flow from container owners, via transfer stations, feeder ports, hub ports, and then be transported overseas. On the other hand, it’s a distributing process when the cargos arrive at hub ports, be distributed via feeder ports, inland transfer stations, and at last be delivered to cargo owners. They’re opposite, but have similar principles. Containers flow in different notes of hub ports, feeder ports, transfer stations and owners to realize multimodal transportation. So it’s very important to take an integral idea into it. It’s of better use of fundamental facilities in order to form a reasonable and high-efficiency transportation network by grasping the multimodal transportation system integrally, using network resources reasonably, and integrating superiority of resources, which has very important significance in accelerating logistics’development, optimizing resource allocation, and improving operation quality.The author first gives an introduction of related theories of the problem of container multimodal transportation, and then proposes the supernetwork method, constructs a model of multimodal transportation based on it. The model regards hub ports、feeder ports and transfer stations as three-level notes from the arrival of ships at hub ports, and each level of notes have their optimal objective functions. But the whole multimodal system achieves its integral balance when and only when each notes arrive their integral optimum. Then the integral optimal condition is given. Variational formulation is introduced, in order to turn the decision makers’ optimal functions into variational inequalities, and then implements modified projection algorithm, finally gets the optimal cargo quantities of simple decision makers in the supernetwork. At last, an example of domestic ports and inland transfer stations is given to test the theory, the program is calculated by MATLAB, and the final results shows a rationality of distributed cargo quantities, which can be regards as a reference of decisions of container multimodal transportation. It proves the rationality of the model and the maneuverability of the theory.