Abstract
Not only between two or more countries but between some regions in a big country like the U.S., there are a lot of problems for allocation and distribution of empty sea-borne containers because of international imbalance of trade situation. Authors presented an effective planning method for distribution of empty containers between two or more countries. For the distribution problem in a country, we propose another planning method since this problem contains different characteristics, i.e., short period movements of empty containers, and no consideration of state of container (i.e., full container or empty container). The distribution problem defined as the transshipment problem is formulated as transportation problem which is relatively easy to solve optimally. A case study for the distribution in the U.S. for 6 weeks shows that the total distribution cost by our method is 20 per cent less than that of the real one.
