Abstract
Stowage planning is an NP-hard combinatorial problem concerned with loading a container vessel in a given port, such that a number of constraints regarding the physical layout of the vessel and its seaworthiness are satisfied, and a number of objectives with regard to the quality of the placement are optimized. State-of-the-art methods decompose the problem into phases, the latter of which, known as slot planning, involves loading the containers into slots of a bay. This article presents an efficient matheuristic for the slot planning problem. Matheuristics are algorithms using mathematical programming techniques within a heuristic framework. The method finds solutions for 96% of 236 instances based on real stowage plans, 90% of them optimally, with an average optimality gap of 4.34% given a limit of one second per instance. This is an improvement over the results provided by previous works.
Original language | English |
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Journal | European Journal of Operational Research |
Volume | 282 |
Issue number | 3 |
Pages (from-to) | 873-885 |
Number of pages | 13 |
ISSN | 0377-2217 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 1 May 2020 |
Keywords
- Large Neighbourhood Search
- Matheuristics
- Slot Planning
- Stowage Planning
- OR in Maritime Industry