Empty Container Repositioning Strategy In Domestic Coastal Liner Shipping System

The imbalance of economy’s development results in the unbalance of trade flow that caused serious imbalance between the supply and demand of empty containers. Empty containers reposition is one of the most important problems for the shipping companies. As a result, it’s very central for every shipping company to organize the flow of empty container effectively and raise the efficiency of empty container allocation.Empty containers reposition has drawn great attention from the scholars and they proceed homologous research. But most of the shipping companies still distribute the empty containers with experience. It is necessary to put forward theory, model and method to match the current transportation net’s development. From the angle of the shipping company and using the land empty containers distribution theories for reference, the optimization model is constructed for empty reposition, so that the optimization of routing, quantity and time is available. The contents and innovative points of this paper include:This paper researches the system and emphasize the sea-reposition from the component of this system, the demand and supply of empties and the price of empty containers distribution.On basis of the existing research, this paper considers both the empty container reposition and the leasing strategy,divides the time spot of reaching and leaving port,adds the constraint of empty containers which are available for leasing.At last,models which can minimize the whole transportation cost are constructed.Then this paper shows that the reposition which troubles shipping company long time can be researched with quantitative analysis and resolve the reposition model with genetic algorithm. The results show that the amount of empty container allocation in all three trade pattern are nearly the same.But the leasing amount is more and more higher together with the degree of imbalanced trade pattern.The simulation of the procedure of empty container reposition between coastal ports shows that it is feasible to use GA to research this problem. This method is useful because it can construct model easily, and also support the empty container reposition strategy.