Research On Empty Container Reposition Based On The Customer Value Classification

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. In order to meet the demand of the customer and to develop itself, shipping company has to reposition the empty containers. That is one of the unavoidable problems in the development of shipping companies.Empty containers reposition has drawn great attention from the scholars and the enterprises, and they proceed research about that. Along with the practice of container transportation and the passage of time, It is necessary and significant to put forward theory, model and method to match the current transportation net’s development. The contents and innovative points of this paper as below:Through analyzing the empty container circulation system, this paper defines the intermodal transportation of sea-inland empty container circulation system, and based on the analysis of the results of previous studies, the paper proposes the method that takes the customer value classification into account when make the decision of reposition. That’s say that classified the shipping company’s customers according to its value, and then the shipping company makes the decision of empty container’s reposition according to the benefits after the customer used the empty containers as well as the cost of distribution empty containers for the customer. Then in accordance with the current value and potential value of the shipping company’s customers, divided them into four categories that by using the fuzzy comprehensive evaluation method and cluster analysis, and calculates the comprehensive value of the weight coefficient of each type of customer/On this basis, in order to improve the shipping companies’ profitability, the paper builds a integer programming model with the target of maximum benefits on the basis of the classification of customers and the comprehensive value of the weight coefficient of each type of customer. Through the calculation and analysis of a case, and the compare with the traditional method that does not consider the customer value classification of dispatching strategies, the paper proved the feasibility of the model, and that the method takes the customer value into account when make the decision of empty container reposition can provide beneficial theoretical support and reference for shipping company decision-making in a multi-cycle.