The ship stowage planning problem

In this work we deal with the Ship Stowage Planning Problem. It is a two-step process. The first step is executed by the shipping line, which designs the stowage plan for all ports of a vessel’s rotation. At a given port, the stowage plan indicates containers that must be discharged and, for each available slot, a class of containers which can be loaded there. Here we focus on the second step, which pertains to the terminal planners. On the basis of the stowage plan, they must assign exactly one container, of a given class, selected in the yard, to a slot of the same class. The objective is the minimization of the total loading time. We present a Linear Integer Model and a heuristic algorithm, to get feasible solutions for the problem.