Placing ships in locks: a decision support approach using exact and heuristic methods

The present contribution considers the ship placement problem, which constitutes a daily challenge for lock masters. This problem is closely related to the 2D rectangular bin packing problem, and entails the positioning of a set of ships (rectangles) into as few lockages (bins) as possible while satisfying a number of general and specific placement constraints. These include mooring constraints for ship stability, ship dependent safety distances and corridor constraints between sea ships that require tugboats.