Stowing a containership: the master bay plan problem

In this paper we are involved with the so-called master bay plan problem (MBPP), that is the problem of finding optimal plans for stowing containers into a containership, with respect to a set of structural and operational restrictions. We describe in detail such constraints and give a basic 0-1 Linear Programming model for MBPP. Successively, we present a heuristic approach that enables us to relax some relations from the model and give some prestowage rules for being able to solve this combinatorial optimization problem. In particular, we split the set of available locations of the ship into different subsets and force the stowage of containers within them depending on their features and handling operations. A validation of the proposed approach is given together with the analysis of real instances of the problem coming from a maritime terminal located in the city of Genoa. (C) 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.