Empty Container Allocation and Transshipment in Road-Rail Transportation Network

This paper focuses on a hinterland empty container transportation system involving a road-rail network. We formulate an integer programming model to characterize the empty container allocation and transshipment problem in the road-rail transportation network. The complexity of the studied problem comes from the diversity of inland container transportation modes and the flexibility of empty container allocation between different supply-demand pairs. An effective and efficient Greedy-SPFA (Shortest Path Faster Algorithm) method is proposed to solve this problem through transforming it into a minimum cost flow problem. Computational experiments show that the applied algorithm outperforms the established formulation. And some management inspirations are proposed through sensitivity analysis.