Intermodal transportation of full and empty containers in harbor-inland regions based on revenue management

The transport of full containers and repositioning of empty containers are essential for the operation of a container logistic enterprise. In a large inland region, railway and road transportation take their own advantages for container transportation in terms of transport efficiency and costs. The combination of the two modes creates larger possibility for logistic enterprise to provide efficient service and reduce operation costs. Thus, this paper aims to optimize the inland intermodal transportation of full and empty containers. Methods: Different from cost minimum model, an integer programming model is proposed based on revenue management, making the model more reasonable in practice where logistic enterprises have the right to reject transportation demands from customers considering transport profits and capacity limitations. The real cases of transportation networks of Northeast China and parts of the southern Europe are applied to evaluate and describe the model and performance.