A Multi-Objective Programming approach to the optimisation of China's international container transport network

China's international container transportation has developed rapidly over the last 20 years. In recent years, China has emerged as one of the world's top countries in terms of international container throughput at ports. Paradoxically, the physical network for international container transportation in China has not kept pace with this growth rate. On the one hand, the inland container distribution network is weak and desperately needs greater investment; on the other, no real scientific approach has been applied to the longterm planning of the network infrastructure. One of the main difficulties associated with the planning of a large scale network is that there are many conflicting objectives which need to be considered and it can be extremely difficult to achieve a trade-off. This paper provides an analysis of the Chinese mainland's container distribution network and then applies a Multi-objective Programming approach to optimizing the network configuration and flow. By allowing the testing of different scenarios, it is concluded that this approach provides a valuable decision making aid for policy makers.