Determining optimal inland-empty-container depot locations under stochastic demand

Maritime freight volumes fluctuate with changes in consumer demand and global economies. In this paper we analyze the stochasticity in the container trade volumes and perform a two-stage stochastic analysis with recourse to determine an optimal set of inland depots to be opened within a 10-year time horizon. The work builds on our previous effort that introduced the concept of an ‘Inland-Depots-for-Empty-Containers’ (IDEC) system for effective regional repositioning of empty containers. We evaluate the proposed approach by performing a case study based on the port region of New York/New Jersey. Results obtained demonstrate greater expected benefit from the proposed approach as compared to the corresponding deterministic or single-stage stochastic models.