Including containers with dangerous goods in the Slot Planning Problem

Abstract

Container stowage problems are rich optimization problems with both high economic and environmental impact. These problems are typically decomposed into a master bay planning phase, which distributes containers to bay sections of the vessel, and a slot planning phase, which assigns a specific slot within the bay section to each container. In this paper, we extend existing models for slot planning by considering containers with dangerous goods. An important contribution of this paper is that we provide a model closer to the real-world problems faced by planners, and thus solutions based on this model should be easier to implement in practice. We show that our model can be solved to optimality in reasonable time using standard software like Gurobi or CPLEX. Keywords: operations research, container stowage, optimization, logistics