engleski

Internet in Container Imbalance Management

Container imbalance is one of the largest problems in the maritime transport sector, causing significant financial losses. Container imbalance essentially means that more cargo travels in any given direction than back, causing the surplus of empty containers at cargo's destination. Those empty containers have to be transported back for another transport cycle, which is not just expensive but is also time consuming. It is estimated that about half of container imbalance is caused by macroeconomic irregularities, while other half is caused by inefficient business practices. Although macroeconomic irregularities are beyond the scope of their influence, container transport companies can reengineer their business practices in order to optimize their business and reduce container imbalance. Reducing container imbalance has traditionally not been an easy task due to the number of "blind spots" in the transport chain and the lack of information exchange between the subjects involved in container transport. A number of electronic business systems have been developed to address this problem, but they all involved substantial investments in the infra-structure and human resources, and yielded only partial results. It was only after the evolution of Internet and XML that such a problem could be addressed properly and efficiently, because Internet presents an inexpensive and quick information exchange channel which connects all subjects in the container transport chain, eliminating "blind spots" and enabling the optimization of container transport. The graduate work begins with a brief introduction, stating the research problem, research purpose and the goal of the research. The second part, mainly theoretical, deals with e-business fundamentals (what is e-business, history and development of computer networking, e-business types, business models, pro et contra, legal issues, security and e-business analysis in Croatia). The final part concentrates on the problem of container imbalance and explains the way of solving the stated problem using Internet based e-business technologies.

container imbalance; Internet technologies; e-business

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