The efficient and effective management of empty containers is an important problem in the shipping industry. Not only does it have an economic effect, but it also has an environmental and sustainability impact, since the reduction of empty container movements will reduce fuel consumption and...

We consider the problem of designing an optimal vessel schedule in the liner shipping route to minimize the total expected fuel consumption (and emissions) considering uncertain port times and frequency requirements on the liner schedule. The general optimal scheduling problem is formulated and...

This paper considers the joint container fleet sizing and empty container repositioning problem in multi-vessel, multi-port and multi-voyage shipping systems with dynamic, uncertain and imbalanced customer demands. The objective is to minimize the expected total costs including inventory-holding...

This paper considers the problem of production and preventive maintenance control in a stochastic manufacturing system. The system is subject to multiple uncertainties such as random customer demands, machine failure and repair, and stochastic processing times. A threshold-type policy is...

This paper considers the empty container management problem in a cyclic shipping route. The objective is to seek the optimal empty container repositioning policy in a dynamic and stochastic situation by minimising the expected total costs consisting of inventory holding costs, demand lost-sale...

This paper considers a manufacturing supply chain with multiple suppliers in the presence of multiple uncertainties such as uncertain material supplies, stochastic production times, and random customer demands. The system is subject to supply and production capacity constraints. We formulate the...

This paper considers the problem of joint cargo routing and empty container repositioning at the operational level for a shipping network with multiple service routes, multiple deployed vessels and multiple regular voyages. The objective is to minimize the total relevant costs in the planning...

This article formulates the empty container repositioning problem for general shipping service routes based on container flow balancing. Two types of flow balancing mechanisms are analysed. The first is based on point-to-point balancing, which leads to a point-to-point repositioning policy. The...