Combinable containers: A container innovation to save container fleet and empty container repositioning costs

Abstract Combinable containers can either be used as a standard 20 ft or in combined state as a 40 ft container by altering the dimensional to match the cargo size. This paper examines the viability of combinable containers for saving the container related costs. We present a model of a minimum cost multi-commodity network flow problem that can be used to simultaneously determine the fleet sizes of standard and combinable containers and their empty container allocation/repositioning. Based on numerical experiments, we discovered that mixed use of both types of containers can save a significant portion of container related cost.