Stowage planning in maritime container transportation

Kang J-G and Kim Y-D ()
Additional contact information
Kang J-G: Swiss Federal Institute of Technology-Lausanne (EPFL)
Kim Y-D: Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology

Journal of the Operational Research Society, 2002, vol. 53, issue 4, 415-426

Abstract: Abstract We consider a stowage-planning problem of arranging containers on a container ship in the maritime transportation system. Since containers are accessible only from the top of the stack, temporary unloading and reloading of containers, called shifting, is unavoidable if a container required to be unloaded at the current port is stacked under containers to be unloaded at later ports on the route of the ship. The objective of the stowage planning problem is to minimize the time required for shifting and crane movements on a tour of a container ship while maintaining the stability of the ship. For the problem, we develop a heuristic solution method in which the problem is divided into two subproblems, one for assigning container groups into the holds and one for determining a loading pattern of containers assigned to each hold. The former subproblem is solved by a greedy heuristic based on the transportation simplex method, while the latter is solved by a tree search method. These two subproblems are solved iteratively using information obtained from solutions of each other. To see the performance of the suggested algorithm, computational tests are performed on problem instances generated based on information obtained from an ocean container liner. Results show that the suggested algorithm works better than existing algorithms.

Keywords: stowage planning; heuristics; sea transport (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2002
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (14)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1057/palgrave.jors.2601322 Abstract (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pal:jorsoc:v:53:y:2002:i:4:d:10.1057_palgrave.jors.2601322

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... search/journal/41274

DOI: 10.1057/palgrave.jors.2601322

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of the Operational Research Society is currently edited by Tom Archibald and Jonathan Crook

More articles in Journal of the Operational Research Society from Palgrave Macmillan, The OR Society
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().