Towards Automation of Stowage Planning for Large Containerships

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.