A heuristic solution for the empty container substitution problem

This paper studies substitution between empty containers of different types in an attempt to reduce the cost of empty container interchange. Since finding an optimal solution requires substantial computational efforts, a heuristic method is developed which yields an integer solution relatively fast. The developed methodology divides the problem into dependent and independent parts and applies a branch-and-bound procedure to the dependent part. Available data from the combined Los Angeles and Long Beach ports are used to evaluate the proposed technique. Computational tests are used to demonstrate the efficiency of the developed method in terms of computational time and solution quality.