Evaluating Pricing Strategies for Storage in Import Container Terminals

In most container terminals around the world, storage space is scarce, and pricing policies are needed to increase performance. Specifically, congestion when inbound containers are temporarily stored in terminal yards leads to high operational costs. This paper focuses on the introduction of a yard storage tariff to encourage early pickup of containers. Different from previous approaches, the price schedule introduced has a nonzero flat rate. Both demand reactions and changes in pickup decisions are considered in the analysis. A model is developed for the objective function (profit of the terminal operator). A numerical example illustrates an optimal price schedule, shows how sensitive the profit is to the basic constituents of the model, and provides general pricing rules.