The Impacts of Foldable Containers Street-Turn and Depot-Direct Strategies on Empty Container Repositioning Cost

Abstract

In global logistics the trade imbalances between the exporting and importing countries (and regions) cause the empty container repositioning problem. While export dominant countries face the difficulty to find empty containers to be loaded and shipped import dominant countries have a surplus of empty containers and try to get rid of them because they are stacked at storage areas of the seaports. Transporting empty containers to the export dominant countries is as costly as transporting the loaded ones because they keep the same storage space and require the same time and handling operations. In this study we formulated a novel Mixed-Integer Linear Programming (MILP) model considering a multi-period and multi-region shipping network to minimize the total cost for empty container repositioning operations. We investigated the impacts of foldable containers street-turn and depot-direct strategies on the container repositioning cost. To test our proposed model a hypothetical case study has been developed. The total costs of different strategies (i.e. street-turn depot-direct foldable containers) and their combinations are compared and the results are discussed. © 2022 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.