Container stowage planning for mobile harbor A1-250

Abstract

In this thesis, we consider the container stowage planning problem of arranging containers on the containership which is docking to Mobile Harbor A1-250. Container stowage planning is a problem of minimizing handling cost and the containership operation cost while maintaining the stability of the container ships. In this thesis, we also considered Mobile Harbor berthing times as well as the capacity of Mobile Harbor. Overstowage is a container stacked under another one whose destination of port is further on the route of the ship. Shifting, unnecessary handling such as temporary unloading and reloading, is caused by overstowage. The objective of container stowage planning in this thesis is to minimize the number of Mobile Harbor berthing and the number of shifting in the ship’s route. We divided the stowage problem into two subproblems, one for container groups into the holds and one for determining a loading pattern of containers assigned to each hold. Computation experiment results show that Linear Programming model and algorithms we suggested are good.