An N-Period Inventory Model of Empty Containers at One Port

摘要

We consider the allocation of empty containers at each port. In order to investigate the efficiency of the policies we consider the problem as an n-stage inventory model, which has positive and negative ordering corresponding to the positive demands and negative demands (the number of export containers is greater or less than that of import containers in a period) respectively. We extend Eppen and Fama's result (1969) to the case of a general holding-penalty cost function and of one time period delay availability for some full containers just arriving at the port. The main result is that there also exists an optimal pair of critical policies, say (U_n, D_n), for the discounted finite horizon problem.