The Study Of Empty Container Repositioning In Ocean-rail Multi-modal Transportation With Foldable Containers

The imbalance of international trade causes the imbalance of empty containers between different regions.The shipping companies are spending a large amount of money on allocating empty containers.As a result of the above situation,it would be of great importance to improve the utilization of the empty containers,make full use of the resources and thus reduce the cost.Currently the study concerning the intermodal transportation is not enough.With the development in foldable container and door-todoor deliver service,the study towards this problem becomes more and more valuable.This paper applies foldable containers to intermodal transportation empty container allocation problems to deal with the imbalance of empty containers between different regions.We construct a linear integer programming model to characterize the empty container repositioning under multimodal transportation with foldable containers.The model considers multiple factors for costs including carbon emission cost and penalty cost of empty containers that affect customer's satisfactory.The model also takes the difference between different types of costs and operational constraints into consideration to achieve feasibility.The model is validated by applying Genetic Algorithm to make the empty container allocation more intellectual.The stability of the model is validated by various scale of data.Numerical study results interpret the relation between the utilization of foldable containers to the reduction of cost in intermodal transportation scenario thus prove the importance of foldable container towards empty container allocation problem.The instances suggest methods such as controlling the rental cost of containers and improving the efficiency in packing up and deploying the containers.The results of the paper provide practical theoretical support for overall empty container allocation to shipping companies.The application of heuristic algorithm makes the allocation process more intellectual with less manual intervention.The solution provided will be feasible and beneficial to the shipping companies.