Robust approach in stowage planning at container terminals

In container terminals, one of the most important factors driving the logistic efficiency in the yard is stowage planning for containers designated to be exported. The stowage plan and operations have to meet the requirement of the liner shipping company of ship stability on the one hand, and to ensure the smooth and orderly process of handling containers, deployment and movement of the yard cranes on the other. These criteria are often in conflict. This paper is concerned with the ship's container stowage planning problem which is formulated as a multi-objective integer linear programming. For the sake of being practical, the model not only considers the conflict between ship stability and containers' reshuffling operation but also first takes into account the moving frequency of yard cranes, the probability of waiting by quay cranes and the feasibility of multi-YC feeding one QC during the loading process. A wide variety of numerical experiments demonstrate that solutions by this formulation are useful and applicable in practice.