Fast slot planning using constraint-based local search

Abstract

Due to the economic importance of stowage planning, there recently has been an increasing interest in developing optimization algorithms for this problem. We have developed a 2-phase approach that in most cases can generate near optimal stowage plans within a few 100 s for large deep-sea vessels. This paper describes the constraint-based local search algorithm used in the second phase of this approach where individual containers are assigned to slots in each bay section. The algorithm can solve this problem in an average of 0.18 s per bay, corresponding to a runtime of 20 s for the entire vessel. The algorithm has been validated on a benchmark suite of 133 industrial instances for which of the instances were solved to optimality. © 2013 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht.