Study On The Container Allocation In Liner Shipping Based On Life-Cycle Theory

Since the new century, with the sustained steady development of world economy, transport industry, as the basic support industry, has got giant investment and development. Though develop relatively late, Container transport, as a new mode of transportation, especially in maritime, is becoming the mainstream of international trade and has a positive role in promoting the economy of the port city or the regional. Due to the unbalance of international trade and regional technological development, there are appear container shortage in the trade deficit areas and container overstock in the trade surplus, making academic research on container allocation a high hot issue. Because of the speed and freight quality, Liner shipping gradually replaced scattered groceries shipping as the main form of organization of international container transport, there are also appear a great amount of researches on empty container repositioning. In general, the existing research is almost entirely focused on the optimization of the operational process of container transport, such as the optimization of transportation network, transport path or the distribution center, but the container itself is almost ignored in these study. As the increasingly serious of environmental issues and the promulgation of restrictive policies come from government based on these in recent years, there are more necessary in the full cycle management of the company’s assets. Although don’t create hazardous substances directly as traditional industrial product equipment do, in the processes of product, circulate or maintenance, containers have indirectly affect on the surrounding environment, on the other hand, the cost of containers maintenance and containers allocation is the largest part of containers management, so it is very necessary to make the containers Life-cycle factor on concerned no matter come from the social influence or the operational influence. This thesis based on the life cycle theory, combine the different characteristics in different life cycle phase, restricted by the supply and demand in the container shipping market, through qualitative and quantitative analysis methods and use mathematical modeling and analysis techniques to prove the necessity and effectiveness of the life-cycle theory-using in the optimization of empty containers disposition in liner shipping.