The Terminal Management Perspective on the Ship Stowage Planning Problem

The Ship Stowage Planning Problem, i.e. determining the stowage position of containers in a containership, is usually faced by the shipping line to optimize vessel related objectives. Here we discuss the problem from the point of view of the terminal manager which aims to minimize the cost of the loading process. We refer to the Gioia Tauro port which adopts a DTS configuration. In this context, the operative costs are related to yard-to-quay transport of containers and possible yard-shifts. We propose a Binary Model, a heuristic algorithm, and discuss the numerical results on real instances.