Reefer Container Assignment for a Single Line Service in Liner Shipping

• Main Authors: Huang, Po-Shun, 黃柏舜
• Other Authors: Hwang, Cherng-Chwan
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2011
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/91226145069380238118

碩士 === 國立交通大學 === 管理學院運輸物流學程 === 99 === Shipping industry is facing environmental changes and keen market competition. Carriers are also difficult to estimate the cost due to price fluctuation of fuel. To minimize the operating cost, carriers continued to enlarge the capacity of ship, but which have resulted in oversupply of capacity in the liner shipping market. To survive in the competitive market, carriers have to cut down freight to maintain its market share. However, it leads to lower profits or even losses. Among the container business, reefer cargos are more profitable. It is also one of the key points to improve carrier’s performance. Because of global climate getting unstable, the demand of reefer container is substantially increasing and growing. But limited by plug numbers of ship, reefer equipment supply…etc, not many reefer containers could be loaded on each voyage. Thus, carriers must well allocate its limited plugs and resources to obtain the maximum benefit. Most of pervious literatures and academic researches are aimed at pursuing the maximum revenue. But simply consider the revenue, regardless of varying cost and empty reposition cost, cannot make maximum benefit to carriers. Therefore, this study use maximized total marginal contribution instead of maximized total revenue as objective function and developed a mathematical programming model and to applied a case study of a Taiwan container liner to test its efficacy. The results show that the proposed model could provide a better assignment of reefer containers to improve the total marginal contributions.