An ant colony algorithm for improving ship stability in the containership stowage problem

Abstract

This paper approaches the containership stowage problem. It is an NP-hard minimization problem whose goal is to find optimal plans for stowing containers into a containership with low operational costs, subject to a set of structural and operational constraints. In this work, we apply to this problem an ant-based hyperheuristic algorithm for the first time, according to our literature review. Ant colony and hyperheuristic algorithms have been successfully used in others application domains. We start from the initial solution, based in relaxed ILP model; then, we look for the global ship stability of the overall stowage plan by using a hyperheuristic approach. Besides, we reduce the handling time of the containers to be loaded on the ship. The validation of the proposed approach is performed by solving some pseudo-randomly generated instances constructed through ranges based in real-life values obtained from the literature.