Role of transport and logistics clusters in creating container corridors for groupage cargo transportation

Abstract

The article highlights the general trends in developing the world container traffic specified by the world container shipping that have formed the market and traffic flow satisfying the demands for the most important container cargoes. Creating the favorable conditions for transporting the containers deep into the country can ensure the expansion of services and provide the accessibility of the advantages of container technologies for the national cargo owners. Hence, there appears the need to intensify activities to improve container handling technologies at domestic terminals and container transportation management tools in general. At the stage of developing the network of Russian logistics clusters as supporting centers of goods consolidation and distribution the most important point is building a continuous chain of container proceeding and organizing the interaction of such centers with the existing international container network. The main function of the regional (logistic, administrative) center included in the cluster infrastructure is to ensure free passage of the container cargo through it. Ensuring the coordinated work of the clusters located at a great distance from each other is the process of forming container communications between the regions and countries, on the territory of which these clusters are formed. This is how logistic container corridors are formed, which, with the growing container traffic and development of container handling conditions, can transform into a network structure. There are illustrated the stages of development of container transportation of groupage cargoes depending on the traffic rate and the of transport infrastructure. The general view of the module for consolidation of groupage cargoes is considered. The issue of developing the hinterland zones of the sea container terminal is analyzed along with expanding the transport infrastructure introducing new means of groupage cargoes consolidation. The conditional division of the regional centers processing groupage cargoes into groups was made according to the nature of the tasks and the competitiveness.