Summary: | 碩士 === 國立臺灣海洋大學 === 航運管理學系 === 98 === Ship enlargement is the trend of the global container transportation in recent years. Major liner carriers have built jumbo ships that make the competition liner of the industry keener. Liner carriers must carefully control the expenditure to maintain their competency. Due to global trade imbalances, empty containers are unevenly distributed, therefore how to appropriately arrange them to reduce costs and meet customers’ needs is an importance operating problem of liner carriers. The container throughput of China has increased which make China the most important market in recent years. The repositioning problem for the ports in North and Central China was studied in this thesis; a multi-commodity network model was constructed to minimize the total cost. The routes which were considered in the model include U.S. East Coast to Asia, U.S. West Coast to Asia, Europe to Asia, Mediterranean to Asia, Middle East to Asia. The costs considered include port handling cost, terminal rental costs, transport costs and leasing costs. Moreover two types of containers (20-foot and 40-foot) and vessel space restrictions were also considered. In addition to find the optimal the repositioning strategies, sensitivity analysis based on adjustment in common feeder cost, vessel space constraints and demand of empty containers were conducted to validate the influences resulted from the changes of these important parameters.
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