A Research On The Location Of Iron Ore Transshipment Center

Iron and steel industry is the one of most important industry in our country and iron ore is main raw material for iron and steel enterprises. Recently, annual production of iron ore ranked first in the world, as well as the iron ore import. The trend of dependence on iron import will keep for a long time. Since the proportion of China’s iron ore imports is too large, and domestic iron ore reserves is scarce, so in the international iron ore trade market, we have been in a passive position at negotiations of purchase price. International iron ore price frequent fluctuation poses a threat to the development of iron and steel enterprises in China. Therefore, we should esTab. lish an iron ore reserve logistics system, providing protection for China’s major iron and steel enterprises. In the tendency of large ships,40-ton super-large ore carriers, which will be main ship in shipping industry, have frequently called Chinese port. Large ships will be more used, forming the backbone of higher density routes and reducing the mooring costs and number of calling port, which will dramatically increases iron ore port call in the region for a short-term period, leading to a backlog of iron ore in the port. Although this is a challenge to China’s large port transport, it offers an opportunity for esTab. lishing the iron ore reserve center for our country.This paper aims to investigate the location problem of iron ore transfer center from the perspective of logistics. We first analyses the condition of iron ore transportation in our country, and explains the necessity to esTab. lishing the logistics centers. A bi-level model is proposed to solve the problem. The upper level determines the optimal solutions for transfer center location, while the lower model generates the cargo flow in each transportation route. Given the call port in our country as the example, we calculated the optimal location of iron ore transfer center. The proposed method provides the feasible solution for esTab. lishing iron ore transfer and storage center in the future.