Empty and Loaded Container Transportation Optimization Based on Cargo Rank

The distribution and flow direction of container freight are significantly different from place to place in China due to the affecting of many factors such as unbalanced distribution of natural resources,the region economy development,city layout and other factors.And this leads to the prominent contradiction between supply and demand of railway container.Therefore,the empty container allocation has become increasingly important.The former optimization models on empty container allocation mostly minimize allocation costs without regarding to loaded container transportation income.The paper addresses the two concerns and formulates a nonlinear integer programming model based on demanding rank of cargo suitable for container and container type.The objective function is maximizing the transportation profit by freight charges subtracting empty container allocation cost.After the empty allocation between different railway bureaus,the empty container demand of the higher rank cargo is more priority than that of the lower rank cargo for the same container type in every container demand station.The model is proved to be validity and feasibility by an example.