Research On Container Allocation And Empty Container Repositioning Based On Dry Ports

With the annual increase of container transportation and the gradual extension of container transportation to hinterland, the hinterland container management work has become a new challenge for all the shipping enterprises, and also the container management cost has been always occupying a great proportion among all the operational costs of the shipping enterprises. As the rapid development of dry port will bring great opportunities to the shipping enterprises who are simultaneously the beneficiaries, so it has been a problem worth to be concerned about and studied for the shipping companies on how to effectively reduce the container management cost and improve the efficiency of container management.The thesis mainly studies container allocation in dry ports and empty container repositioning based on dry ports from the view of shipping companies. It analyzes the elements which should be considered in container allocation to figure out the proper number of container that a shipping company should allocate in a dry port so that all the demands of container usage from shippers can be met and the unnecessary container management cost can be reduced as well. Even though, due to all kinds of reasons in practice, empty container repositioning cannot be avoided. So there is a need to study the empty container repositioning problem in a further way. Through studying these two problems, this paper aims to give supports and make decisions for the inland container management of shipping companies.Firstly, this paper gives an introduction about the theories of dry port, container allocation and empty container repositioning these three problems so as to make a basis for the paper. Then based on the analysis of the organization form of container transportation which based on dry ports and the factors which may have an effect on the container allocation in dry ports, the container allocation model is constructed. In addition, on the basis of the analysis of the real terms of empty container repositioning, the process of empty container repositioning and the factors that influences empty container repositioning, the empty container repositioning model is constructed which sets the minimum repositioning cost as the goal. And finally, Dalian port and all the dry ports within it are taken as the calculation example, the results figured out by using the models this paper constructs illustrate the feasibility and validity of these two models.The main contribution of this paper is that it creatively considers the container allocation problem and empty container repositioning problem of dry ports and constructs the container allocation model and empty container repositioning model based on dry port thus making great supports for the container management of shipping enterprises in inland depots which hasn’t yet be studied.