An automated stowage planning system for large containerships

Annals of Operations Research, 1998

This paper deals with a stowage plan for containers in a container ship. Containers on board a container ship are placed in vertical stacks, located in many bays. Since the access to the containers is only from the top of the stack, a common situation is that containers designated for port J must be unloaded and reloaded at port I (before J) in order to access containers below them, designated for port I. This operation is called "shifting". A container ship calling at many ports may encounter a large number of shifting operations, some of which can be avoided by efficient stowage planning. In general, the stowage plan must also take into account stability and strength requirements, as well as several other constraints on the placement of containers. In this paper, we only deal with stowage planning in order to minimize the number of shiftings, without considering stability and several other constraints. First, we briefly present a 0 -1 binary linear programming formulation that can find the optimal solution for stowage planning. However, finding the optimal solution using this model is quite limited because of the large number of binary variables and constraints needed for the formulation. Moreover, in [3] the stowage planning problem is shown to be NPcomplete. For these reasons, the Suspensory Heuristic Procedure was developed.

The Journal of Japan Institute of Navigation, 2008

Container is a standard in worldwide transportation method, which is capable ofbeing moved by sea, road or rail with relative simplicity. Due to the continuously increasing container trade, many container terminals as well as liner shipping companies are presently frustrating to sborten the turnaround time of a ship for fimancial savings. Therefore. any methDds to improve the containership stowage process would be significant This paper examines the effectiyeness of colltainer amngements in order to evaluate hDw to optimize the stowage plan which was established at the present port and associated with the unloading plan at next port, The efficient of the ship stowage plan is evaluated by the minimllm number of rehandled container required arid the maximum value of ship stability obtained during to trip from the present port to the next port The genetic algorithn is empioyed as a heur istic for the appToximately optimized solutions and the validation of the proposed approach is performed with some computational experiments. Kbywords: Containership handling; Container 1lermina4' Genetic Algorithm; Logistics JapanInstitute of 119g Navigation An Investigation into Effeetiveness of Container Arrangements on Optimizing a Containership Stowage Plan

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2009

Millions of containers are stowed every week with goods worth billions of dollars, but container vessel stowage is an all but neglected combinatorial optimization problem. In this paper, we introduce a model for stowing containers in a vessel bay which is the result of probably the longest collaboration to date with a liner shipping company on automated stowage planning. We then show how to solve this model efficiently in -to our knowledge -the first application of CP to stowage planning using state-of-the-art techniques such as extensive use of global constraints, viewpoints, static and dynamic symmetry breaking, decomposed branching strategies, and early failure detection. Our CP approach outperforms an integer programming and column generation approach in a preliminary study. Since a complete model of this problem includes even more logical constraints, we believe that stowage planning is a new application area for CP with a high impact potential.

This paper presents a tool for the visualization and simulation of automated stowage plan generation for large containership. The stowage plan is generated automatically based on a heuristic algorithm. The allocation algorithm generates different stowage plan in three main stages which includes basic allocation, special container allocation and various stages of stability adjustments. The purpose of this study is to describe how visualization of stowage plan and simulation of allocation sequences can help in the formulation of new and better stowage allocation algorithm.

European Journal of Operational Research, 2012

Maritime Economics & Logistics, 2018

This work addresses the stowage planning problem for containerships, known as the Master Bay Plan problem (MBPP), in the presence of hazardous containers. A novel procedure, based on the principles included in the International Maritime Dangerous Goods (IMDG) Code for stowing containers in liner services is presented. Further, shipping alliances are considered. Our aim is to assist the shipping line coordinator (SLC) to optimize the available space assigned to each alliance member. This is possible thanks to the proposed procedure that finds stowage solutions for ships with different structures, capacity and available sections for hazardous containers, and for companies having different stowage strategies. Our procedure can be implemented in a tool able to verify the stowage constraints and the segregation rules in case of hazardous cargo. Two simple real-life multi-port stowage plans involving hazardous containers are presented and analyzed to illustrate the proposed procedure.

Expert Systems with Applications, 2012

ABSTRACT Maritime container terminals are facilities where cargo containers are transshipped between ships or between ships and land vehicles (tucks or trains). These terminals involve a large number of complex and combinatorial problems. One of them is related to the Container Stacking Problem. A container yard is a type of temporary store where containers await further transport by truck, train or vessel. The main efficiency problem for an individual stack is to ensure easy access to containers at the expected time of transfer.Stacks are ‘last-in, first-out’ storage structures where containers are stocked in the order they arrive. But they should be retrieved from the stack in the order (usually different) they should be shipped. This retrieval operation should be efficiently performed, since berthing time of vessels and the terminal operations should be optimized. To do this, cranes can relocate containers in the stacks to minimize the rearrangements required to meet the expected order of demand for containers.In this paper, we present a domain-dependent heuristically guided planner for obtaining the optimized reshuffling plan, given a stacking state and a container demand. The planner can also be used for finding the best allocation of containers in a yard-bay in order to minimize the number of reshuffles as well as to be used for simulation tasks and obtaining conclusions about possible yard configurations.

Journal of the Operational Research Society, 2019

The relatively limited capacities of inland container liner shipping mean that, unlike in maritime container shipping, capacity utilisation is more important than scheduling. Capacity utilisation and stability must be considered in the stowage planning problem in inland container liner shipping. We adopt a multi-stage hierarchical decomposition approach to decompose the problem into multiple stages because a ship needs to visit multiple ports during its voyage. At each stage, the stowage planning problem of the current port is decomposed hierarchically into two sub-problems: the master bay planning problem (MBPP) and slot planning problem (SPP). The multi-port MBPP is first optimised to simultaneously generate the master bay plans for multiple ports over the full route. This approach incorporates two heuristic algorithms, a greedy randomised adaptive search procedure for the multi-port MBPP, and a heuristic evolutionary strategy algorithm for the SPP. Computational results for randomly generated data corresponding to real-size scenarios of inland container ships are presented validating the proposed algorithms.

2017

The contribution of this paper is the formulation of a new mathematical formulation which brings a linear bi-objective function to reduce total number of container movements and also improve container ship stability issues. Since each movement costs at most, depending on port, US$200, then minimization of number of movements is related with economic aspects. In addition, concerns about typical ship stability measures, like metacentric height and angle list, has been considered in the proposed approach and help to prevent ship capsize. The results attests the validity of proposed model and shows the impact of each objective function in container ship arrangement through ports.

European Journal of Operational Research, 2014

The Ship Stowage Planning Problem is the problem of determining the optimal position of containers to be stowed in a containership. In this paper we address the problem considering the objectives of the terminal management that are mainly related to the yard and transport operations. We propose a Binary Integer Program and a two-step heuristic algorithm. An extensive computational experience shows the efficiency and effectiveness of our approach. A classification scheme for stowage planning problems is also provided.