The Research On Container Ship's Intelligent Stowage

Container ship's stowage is a key stage to container sea transportation. The problem of container ship's stowage optimization is getting more difficult due to the increasing of container ship's size and the number of containers loaded at calling ports. The problem is a multi-objectives combinatorial optimization with several operational and safety constraints. And different objectives are often in conflict. It is unrealistic to solve this problem through sole optimization algorithm. Based on analyzing the influencing factors to container ship's stowage, the problem is divided into three sub-problems:general plan problem, position optimization for export containers in yard and container position optimization on board.At first, container ship's general plan problem can be treated as a Bin-packing problem with variable item size and bin capacity, while the items are containers and bins are different bays on board. An improved best fit decreasing algorithm is established by sorting both of items and bins according human planner's experience.Container yard's layout also plays an important role on ship's stowage. But due to the randomicity of each export container's arrival and weight, it is very difficult to get a sound container yard layout. An optimization model based on heuristic algorithm is proposed to get better container yard layout while the way of handling and handling equipments in yard are taken into consideration.In order to get better stowage result, a mixed Ant Colony Algorithm incorporated with Tabu Search is put up forward to allot each container's position on board. The mixed algorithm can refine the stowage position arrangement of containers while no hampering to loading efficiency and operation difficulty.Finally, a fuzzy evaluation system is used to assess different stowage plans and select the best one.