The Cargo Composition Problem

Containerization plays an important role in the battle for the reduction of CO2 emissions in international transportation. The more containers a vessel carries, the smaller is the resulting CO2 emissions per transported ton of cargo. This suggested focus on vessel intake maximization is old news for liner shippers. Stowage managers fight this battle daily. They are the planners of the cargo
and have to find a load configuration that both suits the cargo to load in the current port and in addition guarantees that the vessel can be utilized to its maximum in future ports. The size of vessels nowadays, however, is making this work harder and harder. Moreover, the cargo composition available in the
different ports might not be suitable for the full utilization of the vessel. To give a very brief example, consider a vessel that has to load a high number of very heavy containers. As a consequence the draft of the vessel will be greater. If the
vessel has to visit a port with a lower draft limitation, stowage managers will have to leave a number of containers behind in order to reduce the draft. In this work we use vessel stowage models to analyse how well a composition of cargo fits the stowage characteristics of a containership.
Moreover, we will present the first vessel stowage model to handle variable displacement. A series of experiments will be presented showing the performance of the model and e.g. it's improved accuracy as a revenue model.