Essays on Container Terminal Operations Management and Competition.

摘要

This thesis addresses three issues in the container terminal operations management, and container port cooperation and competition. In the following we briefly introduce the three major parts in this thesis.;The first part of this thesis proposes inbound container storage pricing game models which characterize the competition between the container terminal and a remote container yard. Two cases are considered: (1) the inbound container's dwell time is random and follows a probability distribution function; (2) the inbound container's dwell time is sensitive to the storage prices. We analyze the storage pricing behavior and competition outcomes of the two players. A number of insights and analysis are provided.;The second part studies the problem of improving the operations efficiency for retrieving inbound containers in a modern automatic container terminal. With the aim of reducing the expected external truck waiting time which is determined by how the containers are stored in a block, we propose two correlated problems for the operations efficiency improvement, (1) inbound container block space allocation problem, and (2) overnight re-marshalling problem to re-organize the block space allocation after some containers are retrieved. Different models and solution methods are provided for these two problems. We use simulation to validate our models and solution approaches.;The third part studies the cooperation and competition relations in a simple dual gateway-port system, where the container operation businesses are mainly shared by two ports, and each port contains one container terminal. With the aim of maximizing both the two port governments' and two terminals' profits in the system, we propose four different two-stage game models to analyze the government hinterland logistics service investments and the terminal price decisions. By examining the government hinterland logistics service levels and terminal price decisions in these four models, we provide several managerial insights and suggestions.