A Fixed-period Order Quantity Inventory Model for Determining the Order Quantity of Empty Containers at a Port

摘要

In recent years, the empty container allocation problem has become one of the important issues in the maritime transportation industry. Containerized liner trades have been growing fast since the globalization of world economies intensified in the early 1990s. However, these trades are typically imbalanced in terms of the numbers of import and export containers. As a result, the relocation of empty containers is become one of the major problems faced by the liner shipping companies. The empty container allocation problem at a port is related to one of the major logistics issues faced by shipping companies: the management of importing empty containers in anticipation of future shortage of empty containers or exporting empty containers in response to reduce the redundancy of empty containers in this port. Furthermore, in the real world it is difficult to make a decision of optimal empty container inventory quantity at a port. Thus, in order to treat the decision making problem of optimal empty container inventory quantity at a port, this paper proposes a fixed-period order quantity inventory model, which is applied to solve the decision making problem of optimal empty container order quantity in the real word. The results show that the proposed fixed-period order quantity inventory model seems to be promising.