A loading procedure for the containership stowage problem

Abstract

This chapter deals with the containership stowage problem. It is an NPhard combinatorial optimization 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 order to optimize a stowage planning, like in the literature, we have developed an approach that decomposes the problem hierarchically. This approach divides the problem into two phases: the first one consists of generating a relaxed initial solution, and the second phase is intended to make this solution feasible. In this chapter, we focus on the first phase of this approach, and a new loading procedure to generate an initial solution is proposed. This procedure produces solutions in short running time, so that, it could be applied to solve real instances.