Container repositioning management in liner shipping industry

Article history: Received January 16, 2013 Received in revised format 23 April 2013 Accepted 29 April 2013 Available online May 1 2013 Managing empty containers in shipping industry plays an important role to increase the profitability on marine shipping industry. This paper presents an empirical investigation to detect influential factors in container transportation and estimates the value of empty containers transportation. The study also evaluates and compares different strategies employed to reduce the charge of empty container transportation. By selecting three major passages including Trans-pacific, trans-Atlantic and Europe-Asia and considering the balance in transportation network, regardless of the origin of shipping companies, an optimistic estimation of empty container transportation would be possible; therefore, empty container transportation could be explained, quantitatively. Furthermore, since shipping companies organize the movement of containers in various routes, four different strategies are also proposed.