Multi-Port Stowage Planning for Inland Container Liner Shipping Considering Weight Uncertainties

The multi-port stowage planning problem investigates the ship’s whole route to make the stowage plans for multiple ports. This paper formulates the multi-port stowage planning problem for inland container liner shipping on the Yangtze River that hedges against container weight uncertainties. A mathematical formulation based on stochastic programming of this problem is presented. Three solution approaches, which include an exact approach based on robust optimization, an exact approach based on stochastic chance-constrained programming, and a hybrid neighborhood search algorithm based on heuristics are presented. Experimental results showed that the exact approaches and hybrid neighborhood search algorithm could robustly solve the problem. With increasing ship size, numbers of operational ports, and vessel loading rates, the exact approaches cannot guarantee the solutions for some large-scale experiments within the time limit. The hybrid neighborhood search algorithm finds solutions for all the instances with an average gap 1.67 %, and it outperforms the exact approaches with respect to calculation time and solution quantity for the large-scale experiments.