|
Full Length Research
Paper
|
|
Container capacity
management with spot market demand
Cong Liu1,
Zhibin Jiang1*, Na Geng2, Bin Xiao2
and Feng Meng2
1Sino-US
Global Logistics Institute, Shanghai Jiao Tong University,
800 Dong Chuan, Shanghai 200240, China.
2Department
of Industrial Engineering and Logistics Management, Shanghai
Jiao Tong University, 800 Dong Chuan, Shanghai 200240,
China.
*Corresponding
author: E-mail:
zbjiang@sjtu.edu.cn. Tel/Fax: (086)-21-34206065.
Accepted
17 October, 2011 |
|
|
|
Abstract |
|
|
The container
transportation chain, which consists of shippers, freight
forwarders and carriers, is becoming increasingly important for
the global transportation and logistics infrastructure.
Traditionally, the carrier allocates the containers to the
forwarder and then the forwarder satisfies the demands from
their downstream customers. However, the carrier’s container
capacity planning and allocation decisions are challenged by
information asymmetry from the forwarders. In order to improve
the transportation chain performance, this paper considered a
transportation chain with a carrier and a forwarder and
introduced the spot market, competing against the forwarders,
into the transportation chain. A corresponding two-stage
decision-making mechanism was proposed: Firstly, the carrier
determined the optimal container quantity based on the
forwarder’s order reservation and the forecasted demands from
the spot market; secondly, the carrier allocated the containers
based on the updated demands from both the forwarder and the
spot market. We proposed several models and then identified some
of their structural properties, including concavity/convexity
and increasing/decreasing of functions. Then, the allocation
policies were established towards different scenarios. The
numerical experiments showed that the introduction of the spot
markets could improve the transportation chain performance and
the corresponding decision-making mechanism was feasible and
effective.
Key words:
Container
transportation chain, information screening, decision-making
mechanism.
|
