Content area
Full text
Received Apr 12, 2017; Accepted Oct 23, 2017
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
1. Introduction
With the promotion of OBOR (One Belt and One Road) strategy, the trade contacts between China and the other countries have been improved significantly. As one of the most convenient and efficient modes of transportation, container transport has been popularized and developed all over the world. For some developed countries, the containerization ratio of general cargo has reached 80%, and the proportion of container cargo also has achieved 20%~40% in all the amount of railway freight [1]. Although the railway container transportation of China starts relatively late, the trend of development is very well. For example, in 2015, the year-on-year growth of the railway container freight volume in China is up to 20.2% [2]. In terms of the mid-long term railway network plan and the eleventh five-year plan of China Railway, a railway container transportation support system which takes 18 railway container terminals as the hub will be established. These terminals are located in the main economic centers and the significant ports, so the transportation resources are extremely rich and the developing potential is tremendous.
Multimodal and door to door transports are the main modes of modern railway container freight organization. The logistics service functions and levels determine the survivability and competitive capacity of the railway container terminals in the entire networked logistics system. As the crucial operation processes, the container handling and storage play a vital role at the aspects of accelerating cargo movement and saving circulation costs in the railway container terminals. Currently, the railway container terminals of China especially the sea port, land port, and metropolis located container freight transport hubs already had comparatively comprehensive handling, transferring, and storage system. However, some problems still exist in the operation systems of railway container terminals, such as low efficiency, high expenses, and weak response...