AN OPERATIONAL APPROACH FOR CONTAINER CONTROL IN LINER SHIPPING

This paper models the process of container control in a typical liner shipping company. A two-stage model is developed to obtain optimal (co st minimizing) decisions for both the size of a company's container fl eet and the allocation of the containers within the company's shipping service. The model lends itself to practical application in the sense that it is capable of handling container leasing, purchasing, stockin g, and allocating patterns; that the data requirements are compatible with the information liner companies routinely gather; and that all th e solutions are quickly obtainable using a PC-286 computer.