AngelStow: A Commercial Optimization-Based Decision Support Tool for Stowage Planning

Nowadays a considerable part of trade goods are seaborne, with around 90% of all non-bulk cargo carried by container vessels. These vessels follow specific routes loading and unloading containers at different ports. A Stowage Plan (SP) assigns containers to load in a port to vessel slots. Good SPs save port fees, optimize use of vessel capacity, and reduce bunker consumption. Stowage Coordinators (SCs) produce these plans manually with the help of graphical tools, but high-quality SPs are hard to generate with the limited support they provide. In this abstract, we introduce AngelStow which is a commercial optimization-based decision support tool for stowing container vessels developed in
collaboration between Ange Optimization and The IT University of Copenhagen. The tool assists SCs in the process of generating SPs interactively, focusing on satisfying and optimizing constraints and objectives that are tedious to deal with for humans, while letting the SCs use their expertise to deal with hard combinatorial objectives and corner cases.