SPUNTB: A Stowage Planning via the Unified Neutral Theory of Biodiversity and Biogeography

Stowage planning, which raises when the ship industry determines the position of containers, is a key part in container terminal management. Literatures show that binary integer programming for that problem is impracticable because of large number of binary variables and constraints. To reduce the turnaround time and cost, this paper propose a algorithm for stowage planning based on the unified neutral theory of biodiversity and biogeography (SPUNTB). A greedy strategy is constructed to build the initial solution. Moreover, randomizing, migration strategy, unloading and reloading strategy, and filter are also introduced to make it more instructive and faster. The proposed algorithm, verified by extensive computational experiments, achieves a satisfying performance.