A DYNAMIC STOCHASTIC MODEL FOR THE ALLOCATION OF EMPTY CONTAINERS

The empty container allocation problem occurs in the context of the management of the land distribution and transportation operations of international maritime shipping companies. It involves dispatching empty containers in response to requests by export customers and repositioning other containers to storage depots or ports, in anticipation of future demands. The authors propose for this problem a dynamic, stochastic model which accounts for its specific characteristics: the space and time dependency of events and the uncertainty of supply and demand data, substitutions, relationships with partner companies, imports and exports, massive equilibration flows, tec. They give a mathematical formulation and show an equivalent large stochastic multicommodity network flow with gains model. Various modeling choices, data requirements, and algorithmic considerations related to the implementation of the model are alos discussed. (A)