Port Related Container Logistics And Its Resilience Considering Vaccination Status

COVID-19 brought new challenges to maritime supply chain,ports and terminals worldwide witnessed dramatic downsize in container throughput since 2020,resulting in less drayage operation around the terminal.The performance of trucking companies is also impacted by this phenomenon.What’s more,as service provider in drayage operation,most trucking companies has a small number of employees and managers.With weak transportation ability,their balance sheet is influenced negatively facing the risk of COVID-19.Meanwhile,many terminal operators limit the entry of truck drivers based on their vaccination status,which also make it difficult for trucking companies to manage their daily operation.Also,due to volatile and repetitive nature of the pandemic,trucking companies may face unpredictable obstacles when scheduling truck drivers because of their vaccination status,thus creating additional cost even may spread the pandemic.With more and more attention on risk management and resilience studies from academia and industry,it is a new method for solving problem of trucking companies during the pandemic.Therefore,this thesis optimizes the employment and schedule strategy for trucking companies,providing a theoretical support for application.First of all,this thesis studies the interaction between trucking companies,truck drivers and terminal operators in real case scenario and analyses the key issue for increasing the profit of the trucking company.A two-stage stochastic model is developed based on the characteristic and specifications of the problem.In the first stage,the objective is to minimize the cost of employing truck drivers,while,after reveal of pandemic related information,in the second stage,the objective is to maximize the overall profit of trucking companies after drayage operation.The randomness of the pandemic,the vaccination status of truck drivers,terminal turnaround time inside the terminal,limitation of entering the terminal as well as the ratio of inbound container and outbound containers are considered.This model decreases the cost of trucking companies due to COVID-19 as much as possible,satisfying the basic requirement of drayage operation.Progressive Hedging algorithm is used to solve the model efficiently.Real data from a terminal in southern China,media coverage as well as statistics from official government website are applied to approve the effectiveness of the model.Then,sensitivity analysis is conducted covering all three stakeholders in drayage operation: trucking company,truck drivers and terminal operator.Managerial insights are developed to provide operation strategies for trucking companies,which are:(1)larger trucking companies show more resilience faced with risks;(2)trucking companies should reserve sufficient hiring budget;(3)trucking companies should conduct more dual movement as much as possible;(4)if terminal operators takes strict gate control measures,trucking companies should hire more fully-vaccinated drivers.Second,after obtaining the hiring strategies of trucking companies,this research considers the preference of individual truck drivers and time slot of terminal appointment system to develop a MIP(mixed integer programming)model and propose Q-learning algorithm accordingly.Real data from a terminal in southern China is used to solve the model.Furthermore,sensitivity analysis is conducted to ensure the validity of proposed model.Last,this research considers the situation where truck drivers enter the terminal multiple times a day,sensitivity analysis shows that motivating truck drivers to arrival at terminal more tham once will increase overall performance of the system.This research develops and solves the problem of hiring and scheduling for trucking companies.After a large amount of experiments,it is proved that larger companies are more resilient against COVID-19;trucking companies tend to hire more fully-vaccinated drivers to avoid potential cost of controlling the pandemic;the ratio of outbound containers and inbound containers has a great impact on trucking companies’ profit.In summary,taking into COVID-19 pandemic situation is more realistic and economic for trucking companies.This research offers a new point of view for increasing efficiency and profit for managing drayage operation around container terminal.