Fast Interactive Decision Support for Modifying Stowage Plans Using Binary Decision Diagrams

Low cost containerized shipping requires high quality stowage plans. Scalable stowage planning optimization algorithms have been developed recently. All of these algorithms, however, produce monolithic solutions that are hard for stowage coordinators to modify, which is necessary in practice due to the application of approximate optimization models.
This paper introduces an approach for modifying a stowage plan interactively without breaking its constraints. We focus on re-arranging the containers in a single bay section and use a symbolic configuration technique based on binary decision diagrams to provide fast, complete, and backtrack-free decision support. Our computational results show that the approach can solve real-sized instances when breaking symmetries among
similar containers