Dong-Ping Song – författare

This book provides a coherent and systematic view of the key concepts, principles, and techniques in maritime container transport and logistics chains including all the main segments: international maritime trade and logistics, freight logistics, container logistics, vessel logistics, port and terminal management, and sustainability issues in maritime transport.

Container Logistics and Maritime Transport emphasizes analytical methods and current optimization models to tackle challenging issues in maritime transport and logistics. This book takes a holistic approach to cover all the main segments of the container shipping supply chains to achieve an efficient and effective logistics service system across the entire global transport chain. Sustainability issues such as social concern and carbon emissions from shipping and ports are also discussed. Each maritime transport segment is addressed using an approach from qualitative/descriptive analytics to quantitative/prescriptive analytics. Cutting-edge optimization models are presented and explained to tackle various strategic, tactical, and operational planning problems. The book will help readers better understand operations management in global maritime container transport chain. It will also provide practical principles and effective techniques and tools for researchers to push forward the frontiers of knowledge and for practitioners to implement decision support systems.

It will be directly relevant to academic courses related to maritime transport, maritime logistics, transport management, international shipping, port management, container shipping, container logistics, shipping supply chain, and international logistics.

This book provides a coherent and systematic view of the key concepts, principles, and techniques in maritime container transport and logistics chains including all the main segments: international maritime trade and logistics, freight logistics, container logistics, vessel logistics, port and terminal management, and sustainability issues in maritime transport.

Container Logistics and Maritime Transport emphasizes analytical methods and current optimization models to tackle challenging issues in maritime transport and logistics. This book takes a holistic approach to cover all the main segments of the container shipping supply chains to achieve an efficient and effective logistics service system across the entire global transport chain. Sustainability issues such as social concern and carbon emissions from shipping and ports are also discussed. Each maritime transport segment is addressed using an approach from qualitative/descriptive analytics to quantitative/prescriptive analytics. Cutting-edge optimization models are presented and explained to tackle various strategic, tactical, and operational planning problems. The book will help readers better understand operations management in global maritime container transport chain. It will also provide practical principles and effective techniques and tools for researchers to push forward the frontiers of knowledge and for practitioners to implement decision support systems.

It will be directly relevant to academic courses related to maritime transport, maritime logistics, transport management, international shipping, port management, container shipping, container logistics, shipping supply chain, and international logistics.

The book takes the inventory control perspective to tackle empty container repositioning logistics problems in regional transportation systems by explicitly considering the features such as demand imbalance over space, dynamic operations over time, uncertainty in demand and transport, and container leasing phenomenon. The book has the following unique features. First, it provides a discussion of broad empty equipment logistics including empty freight vehicle redistribution, empty passenger vehicle redistribution, empty bike repositioning, empty container chassis repositioning, and empty container repositioning (ECR) problems. The similarity and unique characteristics of ECR compared to other empty equipment repositioning problems are explained. Second, we adopt the stochastic dynamic programming approach to tackle the ECR problems, which offers an algorithmic strategy to characterize the optimal policy and captures the sequential decision-making phenomenon in anticipation of uncertainties over time and space. Third, we are able to establish closed-form solutions and structural properties of the optimal ECR policies in relatively simple transportation systems. Such properties can then be utilized to construct threshold-type ECR policies for more complicated transportation systems. In fact, the threshold-type ECR policies resemble the well-known (s, S) and (s, Q) policies in inventory control theory. These policies have the advantages of being decentralized, easy to understand, easy to operate, quick response to random events, and minimal on-line computation and communication. Fourth, several sophisticated optimization techniques such as approximate dynamic programming, simulation-based meta-heuristics, stochastic approximation, perturbation analysis, and ordinal optimization methods are introduced to solve the complex stochastic optimization problems.

The book will be of interest to researchers and professionals in logistics, transport, supply chain,and operations research.