Quantitative Analysis of Organizational Behavior of Container Shipping in the Upper and Middle Reaches of the Yangtze River Based on Hub-and-Spoke Network

By investigating the current situation of container shipping organization at the middle and upper reaches of the Yangtze River, it was discovered that current transport organizations do not follow the basic law of large ship with long line, small with short line but conform to a government subsidies policy. This paper constructs a integer programming optimization model of the container Hub-and-Spoke transport in the middle and upper reaches of Yangtze River and indicates that the container Hub-and-Spoke transport organization mode in the middle and upper reaches of Yangtze River with the axis of the section of Wuhan Newport-Shanghai Yangshan port area is optimized, compared with the existing transport organization mode, which can lead to 5% and 8.4% drop in generalized total transport cost and fuel consumption respectively given the existing ship types as well as 15.3% and 20.1% decreases respectively given the optimal ship types. As the government subsidy policy misled the behavior of the ship market managers, the negative effects caused by the behavior of government and ship managers have also been quantified and analyzed, and a policy aimed at the development of the optimization of the container transport organization in the middle and upper reaches of Yangtze River have been put forward.