Abstract
The passenger-cargo Roll on/Roll off ship stowage (PRSS) is the core step of passenger-cargo Roll on/Roll off (RoRo) transportation. The layout of vehicles in the cabin is directly related to the space utilization of the cabin and the efficiency of stowage operations, which in turn affects the economic benefits of the port. In this paper, we address the PRSS problem in the context of passenger-cargo RoRo transportation in the Qiongzhou Strait of China. By focusing on the utilization ratio of the cabin area, the PRSS problem can be viewed as a special version of a two-dimensional knapsack packing (2D-KP) problem with additional constraints, such as two-phase, complex rotation and safe navigation constraints. Then we present a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) mathematical model and an algorithm framework to tackle the PRSS problem. In the algorithm framework, a novel multi-phase heuristic stowage method is proposed to improve the current manual stowage decision-making state which completely depends on operational experience. Finally, several instances are generated based on the realistic date of Qiongzhou Strait to verify the effectiveness of the model and stowage method. Computational results show that the proposed model and stowage method are well suited to solve the PRSS problem and the algorithm framework has a strong robustness in large-scale application experiments.
Highlights
Roll on/Roll off (RoRo) ships usually transport cargo on wheels such as cars, trucks, farming equipment, and military equipment [1]
This paper studies the passenger-cargo Roll on/Roll off ship stowage (PRSS) problem with the objective to maximize the cabin area utilization of the ship considering the characteristics of two-dimensional packing, two-phase, rotation and safe navigation
The biased random key hybrid algorithm (BRKHA) framework consisting of encoding, multi-phase heuristic and swarm intelligence search based evolutionary operation is proposed to solve the problem
Summary
Roll on/Roll off (RoRo) ships usually transport cargo on wheels such as cars, trucks, farming equipment, and military equipment [1]. Kroer et al [2] proposed two approaches based on binary decision diagrams solvers to solve the container ship stowage problem in a single-bay section. In this way, based on the rated load capacity of a ship and the total length of the lane divided by the cabin, the loading degree of the cabin can be determined by measuring the total length and weight of the loaded vehicle, which is relatively easy to measure. The PRSS problem is quite different from the stowage problems of container ship, general cargo ship and general RoRo ship.
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