Combinatorial Optimization and Strategy for Ship Stowage and Loading Schedule of Container Terminal

Abstract

In order to reduce the conflict of yard, vehicles and quay crane in the process of loading container, and upgrade safety of the ship stowage and transport economics, this paper took minimizing reshuffle times in yard and ship, minimizing the ship center of gravity, getting appropriate trim and minimizing the total moving distance of quay crane as optimization objectives to guarantee the balance of the ship and liquidity of vehicles as basic condition. It built ship stowage and loading scheduling model. The model propounded a ship loading scheduling strategy with heuristic greedy algorithm. The heuristic information in the heuristic greedy algorithm was the number and losses of the stacked container, bonus and fitness of the target container. The whole ship loading plan of container terminal was worked out by choosing the container having the least cost from yard during every schedule. The classification strategy and stacking strategy in bay were proposed in the ship stowage model. Based on these strategies, a scheduling model of ship stowage was established. A genetic algorithm which bases on group coding method and the stacking strategy in bay which bases on the greedy algorithm were proposed as the resolution of the ship stowage model. It can be concluded that combinatorial optimization algorithm and strategies were efficient and effective as the approach to ship stowage scheduling of container terminal from the analysis of the experiment's results.