A novel strategy for stowage planning of 40 feet containers in container terminals

摘要

Owing that the container terminals increasingly secure a crucial position in today's container transportation, the stowage planning, which is one of the important process during container-loading operations, gradually attracts the attention of terminal operators. In this paper, we discuss the vessel stowage planning problem for 40 feet outbound containers, in which a strategy named 'ROIR'is analyzed. By carefully studying the operational flow of vessel stowage, a multiobjective mixed integer programming model is put forward with regard to general principles. Then a specified genetic algorithm is proposed to solve the IP model. An integer encoding technique is employed in the algorithm, together with a self-crossover operator and a mutation operator. Furthermore, numerical tests are carried out and their results show the effectiveness and feasibility of the model. The application of the proposed theory provides a practical significance to improve loading efficiency and stowage quality.

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