Abstract
Containers stowage optimization is a long-standing problem in the maritime industry. Since the problem was shown to be NP-hard, it is computationally challenging to obtain an optimal solution. We first review an efficient 2-phase block stowage scheme which can generate a feasible initial solution in just a few minutes. Since the algorithm relies heavily on checking whether any constraints will be violated by stowing a container at a specific location, we investigate the impact of changing the order in which the constraints are checked on the execution time of the algorithm. We evaluate seven different strategies for ordering the sequence in which the constraints are tested. Experiments based on real stowage instances show that, by strategically reordering the constraints test sequence, we can achieve 2 times speedup on the stowage planning algorithm on average, and up to 33 times speedup in certain instances.
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Lee, Z.Q., Fan, R., Hsu, WJ. (2015). Optimizing Constraint Test Ordering for Efficient Automated Stowage Planning. In: Corman, F., Voß, S., Negenborn, R. (eds) Computational Logistics. ICCL 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9335. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-24264-4_24
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-24264-4_24
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