A research on empty container allocation problem

摘要

Container transportation is a significant guarantee to the realization of many international trades and playing a significant role in the transactions across borders. Empty container allocation and management relate to the degree of container utilization, the cost of empty container disposition expenses, adaptation for containers of goods sent in a timely manner and enterprise economic benefits. Through rational empty container allocation, you can reduce transportation costs under the premise of meeting the heavy container of normal transportation. At last, we could help shipping companies minimize the cost and maximize profits. Under the background of multimodal transport, this article consider of the lowest cost of the empty container allocation and minimal time of total deviation as the goal, establishing a bi-objective programming model. And through the mathematical programming software Lingo, the model is followed by a numerical example, which shows that this model is feasible.