Collaborative stowage planning problem for a liner ship. (17th April 2019)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Yi, Wen; Wang, Wencheng; Hu, Yi; Li, Miao; Zhen, Lu
• Is Part Of: International journal of shipping and transport logistics. Volume 11:Number 2/3(2019)
• Page Start: 176
• Page End: 195
• Publication Date: 2019-04-17
• Subjects: port operations -- stowage planning -- container liner ship -- maritime logistics; Shipping -- Periodicals; Shipping -- Statistics; Logistics -- Periodicals; 387.5
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1756-6517

Abstract

This paper investigates a stowage planning problem, in which a liner ship will visit a sequence of ports, the number of available quay cranes in ports and the numbers of loading/unloading containers in ports are uncertain. This stowage planning problem is about how to assign the loaded containers to the bays of the ship considering uncertain information in the future, so as to minimise the sum of the expected quay crane handling time at the ports. Based on stochastic programming, a two-stage decision model is proposed for this problem. A particle swarm optimisation based solution method is developed to solve the model for large-scale problem instances. Numerical experiments are conducted to validate the effectiveness of the proposed model and the efficiency of the proposed solution method.