Study on bay-filling problem in stowage planning of export containers

Abstract

Owing to the fact that the container terminals occupy an increasingly decisive position in today's maritimeindustry, the container stowage planning which is one of the important procedures during container-loading operations, gradually attracts the attention of port operators. In this study, we discuss the vessel stowage planning problem for export containers, in which the bay-filling problem is specifically analyzed on the basis of Preliminary Stowage Plan (PSP). Bay-filling is acrucial step in loading operations at a container terminal. By seriously conducting on-site research and careful practices in the stowage process of export containers, a decision-making problem of bay-filling is proposed. Herein, a multi-objective integer programming model is formulated based on various rules in the stowage operations. Then for solution, an algorithm framework is developed in AIMMS and calculated by CPLEX. In this way, a decision support system is then established which helps to control the partitioning of yard operations and yard crane reassignment. Moreover, a wide variety of numerical tests are carried out and their results show the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed model. The application of the proposed system ensures a practical value for improving stowage efficiency and quality. © 2013 Asian Network for Scientific Information.