Congestion reduction through efficient container movement under stochastic demand

In today’s world, there is a significant amount of investigation regarding how to efficiently distribute loaded containers from the ports to the consignees. However, to fully maximize the process and become more environmentally friendly, one should also study how to allocate the empty containers created by these consignees. This is an essential part in the study of container movement since it balances out the load flow at each location.

The problem of coordinating the container movement to reuse empty containers and lower truck miles is called the “Empty Container Problem”. In this work, we develop a scheduling assignment for loaded and empty containers that builds on earlier models but incorporates stochastic (random) future demand. It is worth mentioning that in the previous research [5], the empty container problem was divided into two subproblems, including an assignment problem and a vehicle routing problem (VRP).

The previous research only considered the problem as a one-day...