Abstract:
Stowage planning is a process of allocating
containers onboard the ship taking into consideration of
sea-worthy conditions. Moreover, the different ports of
discharge, sizes, types, and weight of containers must
also be considered in order to minimize handling cost
and prevent hazards. Manual stowage planning
requires detailed checking as well as experiences of
planning specific ships. For current generation
containerships, human planners already take hours to
generate a stowage plan. With the emergence of ultralarge
container vessels, it becomes crucial to provide
the human planners automated stowage planning tools
that can generate feasible plans in short duration of
time, allowing the planners to focus on the quality of the
final stowage plans. This paper presents a proven
approach for constructing such a stowage planning
system.
