Container logistics decision making under uncertainty

Abstract

Owing to standardized structure and sizes, containers offer obvious advantages for the rationalization of shipment, of security, of handling facilities and procedures and of multi-modal transportation. Since the 1960s, containerization of cargo transportation has been the norm in global logistics services. Containers are now playing a key role in the globalization of business. The objective of our study is emphasizing on the analytical thinking and quantitative analysis to the container logistics under uncertain environment. Our primal objective is to provide a board study to the problems in the container logistics domain. This is not only to study existing problems in literature, but also to contribute by incorporating new view-points to the problem modelling. In addition, we would also be interested to have a balanced work between theoretical development and business applications. Our second objective is to contribute novel solution scheme in the area of stochastic programming, which is our major tool to solve problems of decision making under uncertainty. Specifically, novel mathematical models have been introduced for the important decision making problems namely: container terminal storage problems, freight forwarding problems, container liner revenue management problems.