Across-region dynamic containers transportation management under revenue maximization

The problem of empty containers repositioning (ECR) is to dispatch the empty containers coupled with laden containers transportation flow among ports according to the fixed schedule. Aiming at this problem, to begin with, one loop itinerary of liner is divided into several stages to analyze the changes of empty containers located in the ports and on board with the time evolving based on the actual business. Then, to attack the difference between supply and demand empty containers in period t and the ones in period t + 1, one model: dynamic region-to-region ECR (DRR-ECR), which adopts the dynamic across-region port set to port set redistribution strategy, is proposed to reduce the possible increasing costs which commonly exist in static port-to-port ECR policy: SPPECR. Furthermore, to evaluate these two models, we compare them with some deductive instances. Results show that in any case the DRR-ECR has absolutely more advantages than SPP-ECR. Moreover, DRR-ECR has significant impact on the safety stock of ports since reasonable and efficient DRR-ECR among ports can reduce the stock and decrease the corresponding storage cost.