A Multi-Objective Model of Empty Containers transportation planning (Case Study: Iranian Ports)

With entering container into transportation area, this area experienced a huge change; however, the imbalance problem between input and output container in ports has been standing until now. This imbalance between import and export has made a problem called Empty Container, as the import and export ports are facing surplus and shortage of empty container. In this paper, to solve the desired problem, the empty containers transportation planning model with two goals, minimizing total costs including transportation, storage, shortage, loading and unloading cost of empty containers, and maximizing availability of empty container formulated by minimizing sum of the maximum shortage of empty containers at the export ports in all periods, has been developed. Then the proposed model was linearized, and with using weighting method was converted to a single objective of the minimizing costs. Finally, to verify the proposed model, a numerical example by considering a time-space network of Iranian maritime ports has been solved applying the Lp-metrics method, using GAMs software. The computational results indicates the efficiency of the proposed model in making the problem balance, reducing the total cost with 66% compared to the real world, and optimality of set targets.