Research And Application Of Three-Dimensional Mixed Stowage Algorithm For Multiple Containers

With the development of the "One Belt,One Road" policy and the development of economic globalisation,container transport is gradually becoming the mainstream logistics transport mode.For those companies with heavy assets,loading technology presents a huge challenge.In order to avoid repeated loading or reduce the complexity of the layout,warehouse staff prefer to choose a larger container than the actual need to load,which leads to the container space can not be effectively used,the cargo delivery cycle is not improved,the company’s transport costs remain high.As a result,this has a negative impact on the market competitiveness of the company in the foreign trade industry.In this context,this paper takes the three-dimensional mixed loading problem of multiple containers as the research object,aiming to solve the problem of optimization of crating in a foreign trade import and export company.The innovation points of this paper are as follows:(1)A strategy of container splitting is proposed,i.e.the mass of the ordered goods is equally divided into individual containers to maintain a balanced mass among multiple containers and to meet the stability requirements of customs loading cargo ships.(2)A "humanised" form is developed.As the results of the algorithm can only be "understood" by the robot,the warehouse staff cannot load the goods according to the algorithm’s operation steps.The algorithm can only be read by robots,so the warehouse staff cannot follow the algorithm.(3)This paper invokes a greedy downward tree search algorithm to solve the mixed loading problem,combined with certain heuristic rules and the combination of this paper’s algorithmic strategy,which in turn can decompose the more complex three-dimensional boxing algorithm into a simple small problem,and to obtain the overall optimal solution of the objective function or a solution close to the overall optimal solution,while satisfying all the constraints and within a reasonable time.In this paper,the algorithm is implemented in the JAVA programming language and a visual presentation of the three-dimensional loading results is derived on MATLAB.Using literature arithmetic examples as test data,the results of the study show that the average loading rate of this paper’s algorithm achieves more than 83% for both weakly heterogeneous loading problems and strongly heterogeneous loading problems.The results of this study show that,using all historical order data of a foreign trade company for the year 2022 as test data,the crating calculation using the algorithm proposed in this paper,the company’s annual transportation costs saved RMB 966,900,a total annual saving of17.12%,and the company’s cargo crating solution was significantly optimised.The analysis also yielded an average calculation time of 587 seconds per order and an average container space utilisation of 89.1%.The experiments prove that the algorithm studied in this paper presents certain practicality and feasibility.