Improving Safety and Stability of Large Containerships in Automated Stowage Planning

Stowage planning is an important task in the container transportation business. The quality of stowage plans generated for ships on a multiport voyage greatly affects a shipping line´s operating cost which also directly affects the competitiveness of supply-chain companies that rely on it. This paper describes ongoing research and development of an automated system for generating quality stowage plans for large containerships. The system consists of three modules: stowage plan generator, stability module and optimization engine. The focus of the study is on the stability module, which automatically generates feasible stowage plans that conform to safety and stability requirements for large-scale vessels. The module can greatly reduce the amount of ballast required by the ship and lower the cost of shipping. The proposed system is tested on a real-world large containership with more than 7000 TEUs on a multiport voyage. Experimental results show that the proposed system is able to efficiently generate feasible stowage plans using only a fraction of the time required by human planners (<;2 min per plan versus 2 hours per plan). The quality of the generated plans is also comparable to human planners in terms of the number of rehandles, crane intensity, safety and stability, all of which are crucial to shipping operations.