This paper considers the empty container management problem in a cyclic shipping route. The objective is to seek the optimal empty container repositioning policy in a dynamic and stochastic situation by minimising the expected total costs consisting of inventory holding costs, demand lost-sale...

This paper considers the joint container fleet sizing and empty container repositioning problem in multi-vessel, multi-port and multi-voyage shipping systems with dynamic, uncertain and imbalanced customer demands. The objective is to minimize the expected total costs including inventory-holding...

This paper considers a manufacturing supply chain with multiple suppliers in the presence of multiple uncertainties such as uncertain material supplies, stochastic production times, and random customer demands. The system is subject to supply and production capacity constraints. We formulate the...

This paper considers the problem of joint cargo routing and empty container repositioning at the operational level for a shipping network with multiple service routes, multiple deployed vessels and multiple regular voyages. The objective is to minimize the total relevant costs in the planning...

This article formulates the empty container repositioning problem for general shipping service routes based on container flow balancing. Two types of flow balancing mechanisms are analysed. The first is based on point-to-point balancing, which leads to a point-to-point repositioning policy. The...

This paper considers an empty container repositioning policy with flexible destination ports. The policy only specifies the direction of the empty flows, whereas ports of destinations are not determined in advance and empty containers are unloaded from vessels as needed. Interviews with...