IJMAS The Impact of Foldable/ Collapsible Containers on Empty
With Port Louis, Mauritius, as a case study, a simulation exercise is performed with the use of foldable/collapsible containers as opposed to the current standard equipment.
The effect of foldable containers on the costs of container fleet management in liner shipping networks. Maritime Economics & Logistics. 2012. Vol. 14. No. 4. P. 455-479. DOI: 10.1057/mel.2012.16. Shintani, K. & Konings, R. & Imai, A. Combinable containers: A container innovation to save container fleet and empty container repositioning costs.
This resolves a minimum-cost multi-commodity network flow problem by optimizing container fleet size and empty container relocation in a multi-port shipping service network. Port handling time and sailing speed provided by obtained optimal solutions enable the determination of ship BCs as a secondary step.
Despite the increase in operational complexity, one foreseeable impact of foldable containers is that the availability of empty containers for exporters should logically improve, since carriers would find it cheaper to rebalance stocks of foldable containers between IPI locations, as represented in Leg F of Fig. 2.
Out of a total of about 5000 containers, an estimated fleet and critical mass of just 695 foldable containers are required for the inland network under study (and the rest of the containers being conventional ones), with a 71% load factor on the back haul.
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