Professor Zhang Juliang from our college, in collaboration with doctoral student Yang Xufeng, Dr. Jiao Wen, a senior lecturer at the University of Exeter, UK, and Professor Yan Hong from the School of Business at Hong Kong Polytechnic University, have made a significant academic achievement. Their joint paper, "Optimal capacity rational policy for a container leasing system with multiple types of customers and substitutable containers," was accepted by the renowned journal Management Science on March 22, 2022. This paper, submitted on February 22, 2019, underwent three years and four rounds of rigorous revisions before its recent official acceptance.

In the context of the recent global trade uncertainties, exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic and shifts in international politics, the container supply chain - a backbone of international trade - has faced significant impacts, with fluctuating container prices. This has drawn the attention of both the business and academic communities to container supply chain management, particularly container revenue management as a profit maximization strategy for container leasing companies. The paper addresses a critical issue for these companies: the optimal approach to serving various customer types (ordinary, advanced, long-term, and temporary individual customers) with a range of container options (standard and advanced, such as cold chain), maximizing company profits.

The study employs Markov decision theory to model the problem and demonstrates the properties and structure of the optimal strategy through the proven good properties of the return function. The findings reveal that the optimal strategy is a threshold policy, a relatively simple structure, and delves into the impact of different parameters on this strategy. A comparison using real enterprise data and computer simulations showed that this optimal strategy could boost company revenues by approximately 6%.

Management Science, a leading journal in the field of management science/operations research, is sponsored by the INFORMS Society in the United States. It is recognized as one of the UTD24 and FT50 journals. This publication by Professor Zhang Juliang and doctoral student Yang Xufeng represents a significant advancement in the research and doctoral training in the field of logistics management at our college.