Efficient distributed maximum matching for solving the container exchange problem in the maritime industry

Abstract

To reduce container management costs, ocean carrier companies rent containers from container leasing companies. Two carrier companies can exchange their empty containers between each other at various ports to eliminate the transportation cost of empty containers. To minimize costs, a container leasing company has to find the maximum number of pairs of carrier companies that can exchange containers. We formulate this problem as maximum matching in a large general graph, and propose a distributed matching algorithm to solve this problem. We also propose several optimization techniques to improve the efficiency of our algorithm.