Article ID | Journal | Published Year | Pages | File Type |
---|---|---|---|---|
10495484 | Transportation Research Part E: Logistics and Transportation Review | 2005 | 16 Pages |
Abstract
The scale of the global chemical industry is enormous: in 2003, the total value of global production exceeded US$1.7 trillion. International logistics is especially crucial to the high-value chemicals industry, since raw materials sources, production facilities, and consumer markets are distributed globally. Fluctuating demand, imbalanced trade flows, and expensive transportation equipment necessitate dynamic asset management. This paper focuses on asset management problems faced by tank container operators, and formulates an operational tank container management problem as a large-scale multi-commodity flow problem on a time-discretized network. By integrating container routing and repositioning decisions in a single model, total operating costs and fleet sizes can be reduced. A computational study verifies this hypothesis.
Keywords
Related Topics
Social Sciences and Humanities
Business, Management and Accounting
Business and International Management
Authors
Alan L. Erera, Juan C. Morales, Martin Savelsbergh,