Research On Heuristic Method For Container Stowage Planning With Stability Constraints

This paper deals with a stowage plan for containers in a container ship, it is mainly determined by two criteria: ship stability and number of shiftings or overstows. These two criteria are apt to change in the opposite way. Generally, Tradeoff relativeship exists between them,one is up and the other is down.Containers on board of a container ship are placed in stacks, located in many bays. Since the access to the containers in a stack is only from the top, a common situation is that shiftings of some containers happen in order to get the container located below them, but need to unload before them. The shiftings are also caused by the stability and many other constraints of the container ship and special containers, these factors are important to the safty of a shipment. Here we just take the stability into our account. We try to fall the Gravity to a proper value to fit for the special requirements of the ship. In this way, we can make sure the GM is proper, while reducing the shiftings as much as we can.This paper analyzed the formulations and Hanging Heuristic Procedure that can reduce the number of shifts without considering the stability and the way to describe the important metrics of stability, such as GM, List and Trim in order to take both of them into study. Based on the analysis, we formulated the stowage planning as the Multi-objective linear program. However it is hard to obtain the solution because of its NP character. So we develop the Heuristic Procedure in chapter 4, and programmed the procedure with C++. We can make the two objectives acceptable by adjust the parameters in the model. In the last chapter ,a larger number of simulation were practiced for testing how each parameter affects the objectives.