Study on a Liner Shipping Network Design Considering Empty Container Reposition

Empty container allocation problems arise due to imbalance on trades. Imbalanced trade is a common fact in the liner shipping,creating the necessity of repositioning empty containers from import-dominant ports to export-dominant ports in an economic and efficient way. The present work configures a liner shipping network, by performing the routes assignment and their integration to maximize the profit for a liner shipping company. The empty container repositioning problem is expressly taken into account in whole process. By considering the empty container repositioning problem in the network design, the choice of routes will be also influenced by the empty container flow, resulting in an optimum network, both for loaded and empty cargo. The Liner Shipping Network Design Program (LS-NET program) will define the best set of routes among a set of candidate routes, the best composition of the fleet for the network and configure the empty container repositioning network. Further, a network of Asian ports was studied and the results obtained show that considering the empty container allocation problem in the designing process can influence the final configuration of the network.