Optimal inventory control of empty containers in inland transportation system

• Published in: International journal of production economics Vol. 133; no. 1; pp. 451 - 457
• Main Authors: Young Yun, Won, Mi Lee, Yu, Seok Choi, Yong
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Amsterdam Elsevier B.V 01.09.2011; Elsevier; Elsevier Sequoia S.A
• Series: International Journal of Production Economics
• Subjects: ( s, S) inventory policy; Arena; Containers; Demand; Empty containers; Empty containers Inventory level (s; Inventory control; Inventory controls; Inventory level; Marketing; Ocean traffic; Optimization; OptQuest; Policies; Random variables; S) inventory policy Arena OptQuest(registered trademark; Shortages; Stockpiling; Studies; Transportation; OptQuest; ( s, S) inventory policy; Empty containers; Inventory level; Arena
• ISSN: 0925-5273; 1873-7579
• DOI: 10.1016/j.ijpe.2010.06.016

In this paper, we deal with an inventory control problem of empty containers in an inland transportation system. In inland container transportation, freights (containers) are transported between terminal and the customer’s location by trucks, trains and barges. Empty containers are an important logistic resource and shipping companies try to operate and manage empty containers efficiently. Because of the trade imbalance between hub ports, empty containers should be periodically repositioned from surplus areas to shortage areas. However, it is not easy to exactly forecast the demand of empty containers, and we therefore need to build an efficient way to reposition the empty containers. In this paper, we consider a shortage area and propose an efficient inventory policy to control empty containers. We assume that demands per unit time are independent and identically distributed random variables. To satisfy the demand of empty containers, we reposition empty containers from other hubs based on the ( s, S) inventory policy, and also consider the lease of empty containers with zero lead time. For the leased containers, we should return the number of empty containers leased to the leaser after the specified period. For a given policy, simulation is used to estimate the expected cost rate and we use the optimization tool, OptQuest ® in Arena to obtain the near optimal ( s, S) policy in numerical examples.