Title: Solving inland container ship stowage planning problem on full route through a two-phase approach

Authors: Jun Li; Yu Zhang; Sanyou Ji; Lanbo Zheng

Addresses: School of Automobile and Traffic Engineering, Wuhan University of Science and Technology, No. 1, Huangjiahu University Town, Hongshan District, Wuhan, China; School of Logistics Engineering, Wuhan University of Technology, No. 1178, Heping Avenue, Wuchang District, Wuhan, China ' Engineering Research Center of Port Logistics Technology and Equipment of Ministry of Education, Wuhan University of Technology, No. 1178, Heping Avenue, Wuchang District, Wuhan, China; School of Logistics Engineering, Wuhan University of Technology, No. 1178, Heping Avenue, Wuchang District, Wuhan, China ' School of Logistics Engineering, Wuhan University of Technology, No. 1178, Heping Avenue, Wuchang District, Wuhan, China ' School of Logistics Engineering, Wuhan University of Technology, No. 1178, Heping Avenue, Wuchang District, Wuhan, China

Abstract: Inland container ship emphasises capacity utilisation due to its limited capacity. Its stability is very sensitive to the stowage plan. The shipping line planners are under pressure to make efficient stowage plan on full route. This paper adopts a two-phase approach to separate the problem into two planning levels: multi-port master bay plan problem (MP-MBPP) on full route and slot plan problem (SPP) for each bay at each port. The mathematical models are proposed respectively for both sub-problems based on mixed integer programming. For each sub-problem, the greedy randomised adaptive search procedure (GRASP) and the heuristic evolutionary strategy (HES) algorithm are proposed, respectively. The grey entropy parallel analysis (GEPA) method is presented to guide HES in multi-objective optimisation. Experimental results based on real-world scenarios are presented to show the efficacy of proposed algorithms and method.

Keywords: heuristic evolutionary strategy algorithm; inland container ship; stowage planning; two-phase approach; GRASP; grey entropy parallel analysis; GEPA.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSTL.2020.105863

International Journal of Shipping and Transport Logistics, 2020 Vol.12 No.1/2, pp.65 - 91

Accepted: 13 Mar 2019
Published online: 16 Mar 2020 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article