Container Balancer for Empty Repositioning
Challenges
- Demand volatility, long repositioning cycles, and limited visibility into future shortages lead to excessive storage, handling, and repositioning costs.
- Manual planning struggles to anticipate shortages across ports and time horizons.
Approach
The Container Balancer leverages historical container movements, demand forecasts, and cost data to optimize empty container allocation across the network.
It predicts future container demand and accumulation by port and container type, then recommends the repositioning actions that minimize total logistics cost.
Key features
- Demand and supply forecasting by port and container type
- Multiple planning horizons: 4, 8 and 12 weeks
- Repositioning actions chosen to minimize total logistics cost
- Storage, handling and transportation trade-offs balanced in one model
- Faster, data-driven planning cycles
Impact
Lower repositioning and storage costs
As stated in the company deck
Shortages and over-accumulation prevented in advance
As stated in the company deck
4 / 8 / 12 weeks
Planning horizons supported