Effects of demurrage and detention regimes on dry-port-based inland container transport

Abstract

Increase of congestion at container deep seaports and shortage of capacity has led inland transport systems worldwide to rely more and more on inland terminals, and on the use of high capacity modes of transport to generate economies of scale and reduce negative effects of trucking. In this setting, planning the transport of maritime containers between a deep seaport and a final inland destination must also consider due dates and soft time windows, the latter known as Demurrage and Detention (D&D). In this paper, we formalize the concept of D&D, model the multimodal planning problem, and assess the impact of different D&D regimes on the emerging inland transport systems. By means of an experimental framework, we compare different D&D policies and provide managerial insights. The experiments highlight the effects of existing D&D regimes on transport efficiency and provide guidelines for their choice in practice. D&D are shown to have a twofold effect: first to limit consolidation opportunities and force the use of trucks as buffer, and second to push containers to dwell unnecessarily at the seaports.