Fast Generation of Near-Optimal Plans for Eco-Efficient Stowage of Large Container Vessels

Abstract

Abstract. Eco-Efficient stowage plans that are both competitive and sustainable have become a priority for the shipping industry. Stowage planning is NP-hard and is a challenging optimization problem in practice. We propose a new 2-phase approach that generates near-optimal stowage plans and fulfills industrial time and quality requirements. Our approach combines an integer programming model for assigning groups of containers to storage areas of the vessel over multiple ports, and a constraint programming and local search procedure for stowing individual containers.

A Shortest Path Heuristic for Evaluating the Quality of Stowage Plans in Roll-On Roll-Off Liner Shipping

“…Stowage planning has been widely studied in the context of container shipping, see for example [1,5,6]. Minimizing the number of shifts is an important objective, both in container shipping and RoRo transportation.…”

Group-Bay Stowage Planning Problem for Container Ship

“…Sciomachen and Tanfani [18] solved stowage planning problem with 3D-BPP, optimizing total loading time and quae crane utilization. Pacino et al [19] and Delgado et al [20] solved stowage planning problem with two steps. The first step separates containers into different categories based on Master Bay Plan, and the second step decides the specific stowage location for each container.…”

A placement heuristic for a commercial decision support system for container vessel stowage

“…Liner shipping companies are in their infancy on using optimization-based decision support tools for this task. Moreover, most of the research on stowage planning during the past twenty years has focused on algorithms to automatically generate stowage plans (e.g., [3], [4], [5], [6]), limiting the role of expert users to result validation. Though some of these approaches generate good quality stowage plans, difficulties arise using them in practice.…”