| dc.description.abstract | The container stowage problem is one of the important problem in liner shipping company, in order to decrease the port operating costs , this problem has to satisfy the ship’s stability and also has to minimize the number of over-stowage. Recently, due to the enlargement of containership, the manual operation of stowage plan is getting harder than before, so the liner shipping company is desperate for a container stowage decision making system that can reach both safety and efficiency.
It is our knowledge that the most research in the past are using mathematical programming method to solve the container stowage problem, but they can not considering the detail constraint in a bay, such as the limit of stack height and weight, 20’ containers cannot be stacked on top of 40’ containers and ship structure limit. Delgado et al. (2012) separated the container stowage problem into two phases, the master planning phase and the slot planning phase respectively, they use mathematical programming method to solve the master bay planning problem by distributing containers into bays without specific slot information, then use the constraint programming method to solve the slot planning problem, however, they didn’t mentioned the stability problem in a bay.
Our research is based on slot planning phase, by using the constraint programming method to build and solved the slot planning problem, including the limit of stack height and weight, 20’ containers cannot be stacked on top of 40’ containers and ship structure limit, in addition to considering the balance in a bay and solved the bay above deck. Without loss of generality, our test instances are all provided by the liner shipping company A, and able to solve all of the instances in less than 1 second, after compared with the manual stowage plan, we found that our feasible solution is quite good.
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