Multi-stage hierarchical decomposition approach for stowage planning problem in inland container liner shipping

The relatively limited capacities of inland container liner shipping mean that, unlike in maritime container shipping, capacity utilisation is more important than scheduling. Capacity utilisation and stability must be considered in the stowage planning problem in inland container liner shipping. We adopt a multi-stage hierarchical decomposition approach to decompose the problem into multiple stages because a ship needs to visit multiple ports during its voyage. At each stage, the stowage planning problem of the current port is decomposed hierarchically into two sub-problems: the master bay planning problem (MBPP) and slot planning problem (SPP). The multi-port MBPP is first optimised to simultaneously generate the master bay plans for multiple ports over the full route. This approach incorporates two heuristic algorithms, a greedy randomised adaptive search procedure for the multi-port MBPP, and a heuristic evolutionary strategy algorithm for the SPP. Computational results for randomly generated data corresponding to real-size scenarios of inland container ships are presented validating the proposed algorithms.