Principles of Combinatorial Optimization Applied to Container-Ship Stowage Planning
Journal of Heuristics
Stowage Container Planning: A Model for Getting an Optimal Solution
Proceedings of the IFIP TC5/WG5.6 Seventh International Conference on Computer Applications in the Automation of Shipyard Operation and Ship Design, VII
A decomposition heuristics for the container ship stowage problem
Journal of Heuristics
Fast generation of near-optimal plans for eco-efficient stowage of large container vessels
ICCL'11 Proceedings of the Second international conference on Computational logistics
MAK₠: a system for modelling, optimising, and analyzing production in small and medium enterprises
SOFSEM'12 Proceedings of the 38th international conference on Current Trends in Theory and Practice of Computer Science
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Millions of containers are stowed every week with goods worth billions of dollars, but container vessel stowage is an all but neglected combinatorial optimization problem. In this paper, we introduce a model for stowing containers in a vessel bay which is the result of probably the longest collaboration to date with a liner shipping company on automated stowage planning. We then show how to solve this model efficiently in - to our knowledge - the first application of CP to stowage planning using state-of-the-art techniques such as extensive use of global constraints, viewpoints, static and dynamic symmetry breaking, decomposed branching strategies, and early failure detection. Our CP approach outperforms an integer programming and column generation approach in a preliminary study. Since a complete model of this problem includes even more logical constraints, we believe that stowage planning is a new application area for CP with a high impact potential.