Containers are widely used in the shipping industry mainly because of their capability to facilitate multi-modal transportation. How to effectively reposition the non-revenue empty containers is the key to reduce the cost and improve the service in the liner shipping industry. This work aims to propose a two-stage robust optimization model which takes into account of the laden containers routing as well as the empty container repositioning, and define the robustness for this model with uncertainties in the supply and demand of the empty containers. We compare our approach with both the deterministic model and the stochastic model for the same problem in the rolling horizon simulation environment. The computational results establish the potential practical usefulness of the proposed approach.
Shu Jia is a Professor at the Department of Management Science and Engineering, School of Economics and Management, Southeast University, Nanjing, China. He received a B.Eng. degree in Power Automation Engineering from Southeast University, and a Ph.D. in Operations Research from the Singapore-MIT Alliance Program. His research interests include Logistics and Transportation Management, Computational IP, etc. He is abundant in researches published in the international mainstream journals such as Operations Research,Transportation Science, Naval Research Logistics, etc.