On Empty Containers Reposition For Sea-Rail Intermodal Transportation

With the accelerated pace of economic globalization and the growing prosperity of the international economic and trade, the total amount of domestic and international freight keeps increasing, which promotes the rapid development of container transportation business. In recent years, with the rapid growth of port container throughput of our country, three channels for sea-rail container transportation and network of container transportation has gradually formed, which creates favorable conditions for the development of sea-rail container transportation. But now the proportion of decentralization the containers of the port by railway is very low, and with the imbalances between international and regional trade, the number and the type of in and out of containers is not on the balance, so many empty containers will appear in the process of container transportation. At the same time, there will be the empty container transportation cost, empty container leasing cost and empty container storage cost. While the cost of the empty container transportation is too high, it definitely affects the economic benefit of the container transport enterprises. Now there is a research issue that how to get high efficiency and low cost in empty containers optimization organization.This paper mainly from the following several aspects of the problem of sea-rail transportation of empty container reposition is studied.1. On the basis of the development trend and existing problems of the sea-rail container transportation, it analyses the current development situation of sea-rail container transportation. Meanwhile it also analyses the problems such as the organizational process and the rehandling mode of sea-rail container transportation.2. On the basis of the transportation process for sea-rail container transportation, it studies the reposition process of empty container, the cause of empty containers for container transportation, the characteristics of empty container transportation, and the existing problems in the repositioning process of empty containers.3. Based on the current situation of the empty container reposition and the perspective of container shipping enterprise, it studies the core of the problems of empty container reposition of sea-rail container transportation. At the same time it analyzes the entire cost, scheduling objective, reposition rules, influencing factors of the empty container reposition.4. According to the characteristics of the diversity in empty container reposition, and considering the factors such as the lowest cost, based on the whole container empty container transportation cycle, it establishes a variety of empty container repositioning model. Because of the container-substitution condition exists in the actual process of container transport, meanwhile, by improving the variety of empty container repositioning model, it gets the improved container-substitution of a variety of empty container repositioning model. And by using LINGO software, it gets the calculation results of the model. At last it analyses the calculation results.