Empty Container Management at Ports Considering Pollution, Repair Options, and Street-Turns

Hindawi Publishing Corporation Mathematical Problems in Engineering Volume 2016, Article ID 3847163, 13 pages http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2016/3847163 Research Article Empty Container Management at Ports Considering Pollution, Repair Options, and Street-Turns Norberto Sáinz Bernat,1 Frederik Schulte,2 Stefan Voß,1,2 and Jürgen Böse3 1 Escuela de Ingenierı́a Industrial, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaı́so, Valparaı́so, Chile Institute of Information Systems, University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany 3 Institute of Maritime Logistics, Hamburg University of Technology, Hamburg, Germany 2 Correspondence should be addressed to Jürgen Böse; Received 10 June 2016; Accepted 1 November 2016 Academic Editor: Mohammad D. Aliyu Copyright © 2016 Norberto Sáinz Bernat et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. International trade imbalances make the management of empty containers within shipping networks an important economic and ecological problem. While import-dominated ports accumulate large amounts of empty containers, export-dominated ports need them as transport resources, requiring a repositioning transportation of empty containers on the sea and land side. Acknowledging the importance of the problem, plenty of respective literature has appeared. Since periodic review inventory management systems allow to model the inherent stochasticity of empty container transportation, they have emerged as a major solution approach in the domain. Nevertheless, existing approaches often omit crucial economic and ecological real world conditions determining the success of empty container management. Pollution, repair options, and street-turns are important aspects in this context. In this work, we present new stochastic review policies incorporating a realistic allocation scheme for empty container emissions, realistic maintenance, and repair options as well as street-turns. We analyze the optimality of the proposed polices and evaluate them in a simulation model with metaheuristic parameter search based on extensive real-world data from a major global shipping company operating in Latin America. Results provide insights for academics and practitioners about the economic and ecological impact of the distinct empty container management polices within a shipping network. 1. Introduction Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in maritime shipping have received much attention in recent years and are widely seen as a major constraint for sustainable growth in worldwide trade among researchers and practitioners of the field. Due to the trade imbalance, for example, between Asia and Europe, a significant share of global container movements are movements of empty containers. Current empirical studies estimate a percentage between 20 and 30 per cent empty container movements in maritime shipping and even up to 50 per cent in the hinterland [1]. Empty containers are therefore responsible for a significant part of emissions produced in maritime transport. Since empty containers, in contrast to full containers, need to satisfy an internal demand of the shipping company, there may be more space for emission integrated planning approaches in empty container transport. Though the connection between emission models in maritime shipping and empty container repositioning has been drawn [2], there remains lack of respective models on all planning levels of empty container management. One way to address the problem of empty container repositioning is inventory management approaches applied to manage orders and stock levels of empty containers in ports. For instance, Li et al. [3, 4] have introduced a heuristic for repositioning policies based minimum and maximum numbers of empty containers at ports, and more recently, Dang et al. [5] have presented a simulation-based optimization approach for demand dependent positioning of empty containers between ports and between depots of ports. Although the importance of emissions caused by empty containers has been well understood [2], little effort has been made to extend existing models to multiobjective formulations incorporating business and sustainability objectives. This is 2 in line with an observed need for stochastic multiobjective models integrating both planning objectives in maritime shipping [6]. Apart from that, the importance of real-world conditions such as damaged containers or street-turns have recently been stressed in shipping network design [7], where street-turns refer to the operation of directly reusing an imported unloaded container, that is, directly moving it from the consignee’s to the shippers’ location without bringing the container to a depot or warehouse before. In this paper, we present several new, inventory-based empty container management policies using emissions prices for a cost function that integrates economic and ecological objectives, on the sea and land side. These policies serve to evaluate the pollution impact of empty container transport, maintenance, and repair as well as street-turns options. We examine the proposed policies analytically and evaluate them in a simulation approach with metaheuristic parameter search, assuming the case of a Latin American shipping service operated by a major shipping company. While Markov decision processes are used to design threshold policies, simulation techniques are applied to evaluate their performance since they provide solutions for complex and realistic problems [8]. We find that the presented model may actually enable planners to master the observed potential trade-off in objectives and may be an effective way to more realistic, more sustainable empty container management. The following sections present relevant literature, extended periodic review policies for empty container management, and a simulation optimization model with a numerical study based on real world data as well as conclusions drawn from the study. Section 2 reviews current empty container management models and emission-oriented maritime logistics. Section 3 introduces the empty container inventory management approach and analyzes the proposed policies with respect to their optimality. Section 4 describes the simulation model and the optimization approach for the evaluation, complemented by a numerical study in Section 5. Section 6 gives conclusions and an outlook on future research. 2. Literature Review Invoked by cost saving requirements in industry, literature provides an extensive body of studies on empty container management and repositioning of empty containers between ports [9]. Some of the prominent studies in this respect adapt inventory management models already established in industrial or production management, but little work has been done to connect those models to pollution objectives and some subtle, but importan (...truncated)