Abstract: With the rapid development of the world economy, maritime container transport with its large transport volume and low transport cost can effectively reduce the disadvantages of cargo damage and poor goods. It has become the main mode of transport in world trade to provide efficient and reliable transportation for the owners of cargo. In the actual course of route transportation, how to reasonably allocate container slot on the basis of meeting the market demand of each port pair to maximize the profit of the liner company, that is, the optimization of container slot allocation, is the focus of the operational decision of the liner company. In order to take the market share, expand the scope of operation and enhance their core competitiveness, liner companies adopt the strategic cooperation model of liner alliance to achieve a win-win cooperation. In the context of liner alliance, liner companies mainly cooperate in the form of mutual slot rental, slot exchange, slot rental and joint dispatch of ships. In actual transportation, mutual slot rental is widely used because of its strong flexibility and cooperation in the form of mutual rent on different routes. However, in similar routes, the threshold of slot exchange is low, and slot sharing can be realized only by signing a slot exchange agreement and exchanging the same number of slots. In the case of similar routes, the form of slot exchange can reduce rental settlement and is more flexible than mutual slot renting. Therefore, it is of practical significance to allocate container slot in the form of slot exchange under the background of liner alliance.
   In container liner transportation, there are many factors that affect its transportation. Because of the influence of the world economic environment and seasonality, demand is uncertain. How to overcome the influence of demand disturbance on the optimization of shipping slot allocation and make reasonable decisions in the complex environment has always been a difficult problem for liner companies. In addition, with the development of container transportation, the production of empty containers is essential. How to effectively manage empty containers and reduce the cost of transportation has become a difficult problem for liner companies. Therefore, when it comes to the problem of container slot allocation, it is necessary to comprehensively consider the research and analysis of empty containers in the environment of uncertain demand.
   Starting from the two aspects of container slot allocation and the related overview of liner alliance, this thesis introduces the influencing factors and solving methods of container slot allocation in detail, as well as the advantages and disadvantages of liner alliance and cooperation forms, so as to create a good theoretical foundation for the establishment of the model. Based on the theoretical basis, this thesis considers the cooperative transport of laden empty containers under uncertain market demand in the context of liner alliance, adopts the slot exchange strategy, aims to maximize the profit of liner companies, introduces the distributed robust opportunity constraint method, and transforms the demand uncertainty constraint into an equivalent form that can be easily solved. A distributed robust probability-constrained multi-period stochastic programming model for cooperative transport of laden empty containers is constructed. Finally, CPLEX software is used to solve the problem. The applicability of the model is verified by a series of numerical experiments based on the Asian route among China, Japan and South Korea. The results show that the exchange strategy can increase the profit of the liner company, and reasonable empty container transportation can ensure that the number of available empty containers in the storage yard can meet the transportation demand of the liner company. In this paper, only a single strategy of slot exchange is considered. Future research can consider combining multiple strategies for transportation. Combined strategy can realize the internal profit maximization of a liner company or liner alliance. We can also consider the situation of the cancellation of the reservation and the study of the allocation of the container slot under the overbooking strategy, and establish a dynamic optimization model of the allocation of the container slot according to the market demand.

Key words: slot allocation, slot exchange, empty container repositioning, liner alliance, distributed robust chance constraint

摘要： 班轮公司为抢占市场,扩大受益,纷纷组建班轮联盟。当前班轮市场份额高度集中,竞争日渐激烈。为解决上述问题,本文针对市场需求分布信息不确定条件下的多周期重空箱协同调运问题,采用舱位互换策略,基于市场需求的均值和方差信息,以班轮公司利润最大化为目标,建立了分布式鲁棒机会约束多周期重空箱协同调运随机规划模型,将分布式鲁棒机会约束转化为易求解的等价形式,利用CPLEX软件进行求解。以中日韩的亚洲航线为例进行分析,一系列数值实验验证了模型的适用性。研究结果表明舱位分配中采用互换策略可以增加班轮公司收益,合理的调运空箱可以确保堆场可用空箱数量能够满足班轮公司的运营需求。

关键词: 舱位分配, 舱位互换, 空箱调运, 班轮联盟, 分布式鲁棒机会约束