An LNS approach for container stowage multi-port master planning

Abstract

The generation of competitive stowage plans have become a priority for the shipping industry. Stowage planning is NP-hard and is a challenging optimization problem in practice. Two-phase decomposition approaches have proved to give viable solutions. We propose a large neighborhood search (LNS) to solve the first of the two phases, the multi-port master planning problem. Our approach combines the strength of mathematical modeling with the flexibility of a local search. We show how the new approach can solve more instances than previous mathematical models, and present an analysis of its performance. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.