Regional empty marine container management

Empty container repositioning is one of the longstanding and ongoing issues in the containerized maritime trade. Even though it is a non-revenue generating, expensive and undesirable exercise, it is an integral part of an overall efficient global transportation system, which balances demand and supply of empty containers between regions. Empty containers are repositioned at three levels - global, inter-regional and regional-level. The focus of this dissertation is at the regional level of empty container repositioning. Regional repositioning of empty containers involves empty container movement between regional importers, marine terminals, empty container depots, and export customers. This chain movement generates excessive unproductive empty vehicle miles in a region. The problem of empty vehicle miles travelled becomes more prominent when empty container depots are located close to the port and import and export customers are inland. Stakeholders incur large system costs in repositioning empty containers between the regional import-export business locations and the port/depots. Regions with high import activity are concerned with the increase in containerized trade volumes and the persistent trade imbalance because of the capacity shortfall at their existing depots. This thesis addresses the above two regional concerns of excessive empty vehicle miles and empty container storage capacity shortfall by proposing an 'Inland-Depots-for-Empty-Containers (IDEC)' system. It recommends opening new empty container depots inland in the region, closer to high volume import-export customer clusters, in addition to the depots currently being located near the ports. The dissertation discusses the feasibility, viability, and effectiveness of the proposed system. It develops mathematical models for the IDEC system to determine the optimal number and location of inland depots in a given region under deterministic and stochastic demand patterns. Exploiting the structure of the NP-hard problem, it develops a heuristic based on the randomized rounding algorithm to solve large scale, realistic depot-location problems. To implement a successful and sustainable IDEC system, it explicitly considers the varied perspectives of different maritime stakeholders involved in the container movement. Based on the models and quantitative analyses, it demonstrates that an IDEC system has great potential in improving regional empty moves, increasing both business profitability and social welfare simultaneously.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical references (p. 133-144)